Chapter 25

And now he saw the whole road of man, from the simple consciousness of animals, through human self-consciousness, to the cosmic consciousness of prophets--and beyond to Divinity. Always the refinement of matter, and the attraction of light--spiritual light. He saw the time when a self-conscious man was the best specimen of the human race. So for cosmic consciousness, the time would come; and as the centuries passed, the earlier would it appear in the life of the evolved.

A clear expression of what had taken place within him now appeared--his own expression to make it clear for men. In the summit of self-consciousness, his mind was like a campfire in the night--a few objects in a circle of red firelight and shadow. The crown of cosmic consciousness now come, was _the dawn of full day upon the plain_.

Full day upon the plain--distances, contours, the great blooms of space; a swarm of bees, a constellation of suns; the traffic of ants among the dropped twigs of the sand, the communion of angels beyond the veils of heaven; the budding of a primrose, the resurrection of a God--and all for men, when the daybreak and the shadows flee away.

He saw that this was the natal hour of the world's soul-life, and that it would come through the giving spirit of Woman. He saw great souls pressing close to every pure, strong, feminine spirit; the first fruits of the centuries hovering close to great women of the world, praying for bodies to toil with, eager to turn from their heaven to labor for men.... And this was the _shekinah_ of Andrew Bedient--the spirit of his message.

* * * * *

His blood ceased to flow; he heard the flight of angels; he was bathed in Brahmic splendor--until he could bear no more....

He awoke in the "ambrosia of dawn"; in that strange hush which lies upon the world before fall the floods of rosy red.... He arose, his feet stumbling with ecstasy. Light winged over the hills--and afar off, he saw the roofs of the _hacienda_ sharpen with day....

His face was like morning upon a cloud. The natives vanished before him; Falk and Leadley shrank back, wondering what manner of drink he had found in the night.

THIRTY-FIFTH CHAPTER

FATE KNOCKS AT THE DOOR

During the month that followed, Bedient wrote at length to all his friends in New York. Nightly he roamed the hills and rode his lands throughout the long forenoons. It was a season of sheer exaltation. The great house had become dear to him. His own fullness was enough. There was no loneliness--"loneliness, with our planet in the Milky Way?"... He felt a sense of authority in what he wrote, altogether new, a more finished simplicity--the very white wine of clarity.

Then he placed great energies of planting upon the lands Jaffier had conferred upon Miss Mallory; and carried out plans for the increase of his own harvests. In fact, he was more interested than ever in this base of his future operations in New York. He realized the need of help--an ordering executive mind. His brain and body quickly adjusted to the great good which had descended upon him--work and praise, and love for all things. With these, his hours breathed.

One midnight in July, as he lay awake, an impulse came to play Beethoven's symphony--in the dark.... He arranged the four rolls to hand, turned off the lights again, and sat down before the orchestrelle. The opening bars, which the Master designated, "_So pocht das Schicksal an die Pforte_," lured his every power of concentration. He was one with it, and movements of the dark swung with the flow of harmony. The silence startled him. It was hard to re-assemble his faculties to change the rolls for the _'Andante_....

The three voices returned to his mind--man and woman and the luminous third Presence. That which had always been dim and formless before, now cleared--the place and the man. The room was large and had the character of a music studio, or one department of a large conservatory. A grand piano, a stand for violin, pictures of the masters, and famous musical scenes on the wall--more, there was music in the air--intervals when the three figures seemed to listen. A violin was across the man's knee, a bow in his right hand.

The man was down, whipped. The world had been too much for him. The face was not evil, nor was it mighty. A tall young man--a figure knit with beauty and precision. It was the figure of a small man enlarged, rather than one of natural bulk. Bedient's recognition of the man was not material; some inner correspondence made him know.... He was sitting upon a rocker, too small and low for him. The long, perfect limbs stretched out would have appeared lax and drunken but for their grace of line. The bow-hand dropped limp, almost to the floor. The other moved the violin about, handled it lightly, familiarly, as one would play with a scarf. Fugitive humor flashed across the face, relieving the deep disquiet, but the laugh was an effort of one who was confronted by demolished fortunes. His whole look was that of a man who has been shown some structural smallness of his own, shown beyond doubt--his ranges of personal limitation, made clear and irrefutable. He recognized his master in the woman opposite.... Yet powerful natural elements within him were bearing upon the hateful revelation. They sought to cover the puny nakedness, and make an hallucination of it all. He was not evolved enough to accept the truth with humility.

* * * * *

The woman was psychically torn. The agony of her face cannot be pictured, nor her martyrdom of sustaining courage. She could not see the third Presence, but it was there _for her_. It was above her, yet was called by her natural greatness. There was a line of luminous white under her eyes, that left the lower part of her face in shadow. The eyes were shining with that dissolving supernatural light, that comes with terrible spiritual hunger. Her dark hair had fallen in disarray.

In the first transcendent happiness she had conceived a child. The hideous disillusionment was now--months before the babe. And her struggle at this moment of her heart's death--was to keep the madness of sorrow from despoiling the child, that lay formative within--to preserve the child whole, and in her original greatness of ideal, in the midst of her own destroying, and against the defiling commonness that had just been revealed in the father....

She had crossed the last embankment of agony; her struggle was finished. She had conquered. The Presence had come to hold her mind true, in this passage through chaos.... Her own death she would have welcomed, save that the babe must live. It had come to her as a daybreak from heaven. It must not be crushed and weighted with this tragedy of pure earth.... She held the blight from the child!

She _knew_ this. She arose and smiled. Into her soul had come a sense of the amplitude of time--a promise of adoration--a blessing upon her courage--a knowledge of her child's lustre. The Angel had whispered it. Blithe, lifting, loving, the message had come to her from the Presence.

The man perceived that he had hurt her mortally; that his meaning to her had vanished. He arose to approach her, but a gesture of her hand made him sink again into the low chair. He seemed trying to realize that she had passed beyond him, indeed,--trying to realize what it would mean to him.... Pitiful, boyish and unfinished, he struggled to adjust his own life to her going--and watched her bind her hair.

Every movement of the conflict held a globe of meaning for the son of this woman, a third of a century afterward. Her tragedy had marked it imperishably upon the tissue of his life, with Beethoven's _Andante_ movement for the key. Strains of it may have come to that music-room with these towering emotions.... More than this Andrew Bedient saw the sources of his own heritage! From another aspect he viewed the deathlessness of time, the beauty of physical death, the radiance of the future, the immortality of love. It was revealed how all the agony of the world arises from the knitting together of soul and flesh, the evolving of soul through flesh. Spirit is given birth in flesh--and birth is pain. Death is the ecstasy of the grown spirit. Spirit prospers alone through giving, and greatly through the giving of love. Spirit shines star-like in the giving of woman--in the fineness and fullness which she _loves_ into her children, binding glory upon them with her dreams. Thus is expressed her greatness; thus women are nearest the sources of spirit; thus they fulfill the first meaning of life on earth. And the woman who preserves the nobility of her conception of Motherhood--against the anguish of a broken heart and a destroyed love--God sends his Angels to sustain her!...

Bedient was aroused at last in the silence and in the dark.... He knelt in a passion of tribute to his immortal heroine, whose spirit had danced with him above the flesh and the world. He saw again that he was ordained to look within for the woman; that his heart was his mother's heart; his spirit, her spirit--this twain one in loving and giving.

IV

NEW YORK

_Allegro Finale_

THIRTY-SIXTH CHAPTER

THE GREAT PRINCE HOUSE

There were calms and conquests on the brow of Vina Nettleton. She had been in Nantucket one whole day alone, before David Cairns came. Such a day availeth much, but she shuddered a little at the joy she took in the prospect of his coming. Vina had learned what his absence meant a month before, when three entire days elapsed without a call from Cairns at the studio. He had been away on a certain happiness venture.... There had been no word yet, but here, Nantucket--Vina breathed deeply at the name. Almost every day their thoughts had turned a sentence upon this meeting.... He stepped forth from the little steamer late in the afternoon in a brisk proprietory fashion, but the treasures of boyhood were shining in his eyes; and he searched her face deeply, as if to detect if mortal illness had begun its work amid the terrible uncertainties of separation.

"Do you remember, at first, I was to find you down among the wharves with _Moby Dick_?" she said.

"To-morrow morning--for that," he replied.

She showed him the way to his hotel, and the house where she was a guest. But they supped together.

... They walked in Lily Lane in the dusk.

"It's too dark to see the Prince Gardens," she told him. "They're the finest on the Island, and the house is the finest in Lily Lane.... There doesn't seem to be a light. I wonder if the old sisters are gone?... The Princes were a great family here years and years ago, but gradually they died out and dwindled away, until last summer there were only two old maiden-aunts left--lovely, low-voiced old gentlewomen, whom it was so hard to _pay_ for their flowers. But they lived from their gardens and now _they're_ gone, it seems. I must ask to-morrow what has become of them. And yet, the gardens are kept up. Can you see the great house back in the shadows among the trees?"

Cairns believed he could make out something like the contour of a house in denser shadow.

"The fragrance of the gardens is lovelier than ever," Vina went on, "and listen to the great trees whispering back to the sea!"

They walked along the shore, and stared across toward Spain, and talked long of Beth and Bedient.... And once Vina stretched out her arms oversea, and said:

"Oh, I feel so strange and wonderful!"

Cairns started to speak, but forbore....

They met early in the morning, down upon the deserted water-front. An hour of drifting brought them back to Lily Lane. There was a virginal pallor in the sunlight, different from the ruddy summer of the Mainland, as the honey of April is paler and sweeter than the heartier essence of July flowerings. The wind breathed of a hundred years ago, and the sublime patience of the women who hurried down Lily Lane (faded but mystic eyes that lost themselves oversea through thousand-day voyages), to welcome their knight-errants, bearing home the marrow of leviathans....

"The gardens are kept up," Vina said, standing on the walk, before the Prince house. "Perhaps the old sisters are still there, and we may get some flowers from them----"

"I think, if you'll let me walk ahead and talk with the gardener," Cairns said, "we'll be allowed to go in--at least, for some flowers."

She laughed at the audacity of a stranger in Nantucket, but bade him try.

"If you fail, it's my turn," she added.

Cairns seemed to have little trouble in negotiating with the gardener, and presently beckoned.

"I've done very well for a stranger," he whispered. "We're to have the flowers. More than that, we are to look through the house. The sisters are away----"

"David----"

"But I told him who you were--about your friends and relatives in Nan--here.... I assure you, he believes we have never set foot out of New England."

There was a sweet seasoning in the house; decades of flowers and winds, spare living, gentle voices and infallible cleanliness--that perfumed texture which years of fineness alone can bring to a life or to a house.

"See, the table is set for two!" Vina whispered, "as if the sisters were to be back for dinner. Everything is just as they left it."

They moved about the front rooms, filled with trophies from the deep, a Nantucketer's treasures--bits of pottery from China, weavings from the Indies, lacquers from Japan--over all, spicy reminders of far archipelagoes, and the clean fragrance of cedar.

On the mantel in the parlor stood a full-rigged ship, a whaling-ship, with her trying-house and small-boats--a full ship, homeward bound....

The gardener had left them to their own ways.

"That's because he knows your _folks_," Cairns said softly. "Shall we look upstairs?"

"Oh, do you think we'd better?"

"Don't you want to?"

"Yes----"

"It isn't a liberty--when we have the proper spirit."

"Isn't it, David?" ... With hushed voices and light steps, they passed up and through the sunny rooms. Fresh flowers everywhere, and one bright room with two small white beds.

"The maiden-aunts," Cairns said hoarsely.

At length, he held open for her to enter, the door of the great front room, filled with Northern brightness from a skylight of modern proportions.

"Why, David," she whispered raptly, "it's like a studio! It _is_ a studio!"

And then she saw the scaffoldings, the ladders and panels which do not belong to a painter.

She faced him....

The room was filled with adoration that enchanted the light. The branches of the trees about the lower windows, softly harped the sound of the sea ... Vina's hands were pressed strangely to her breast, as she crossed to an open window.... And there she stood, face averted, and not moving her hands, until she felt him near.

* * * * *

"But I must tell you that the thought was not mine first of all, Vina," Cairns was saying an hour afterward. "You used to talk to me a great deal about Nantucket--about the houses in Lily Lane, the little heads about the table, and how you walked by, watching hungrily like a night-bird--peering in at simple happiness. I couldn't forget that, and I told Bedient--how you loved Nantucket. One night at the club, he said: 'Buy one of those houses, David, and let her find out some summer morning slowly--that it is hers--and watch her face.' Then he suggested that we both come over here to see about it. That's what took us away a month ago."

There was a soft light about her face, not of the room. Cairns saw it as she regarded him steadily for a moment. "I love your telling me that, David," she said.

"I could hardly hold the happiness of it so long," he added. "Last night it was hard, too.... So Bedient and I came over and met the maiden-aunts. Such a rare time we had together--and yet, deep within, he was suffering."

"He went away almost immediately afterward, didn't he?"

"Yes.... Vina, do you think he couldn't make Beth forget the Other?"

"No, David."

Her unqualified answer aroused him. "I haven't seen Beth for weeks," he said. "She has been out of town mostly. I must see her now."

"Yes?"

"Vina, what a crude boy, I was--not to have known you--all these years. It seems as if I had to know Bedient first."

"Perhaps, I did too, David."

"And Vina, it was a word of Beth's that started me thinking about you--that made me realize you were in the world.... This moment I would give her my arms, my eyes--for that word of hers."

"She is the truest woman I have ever known," Vina said.

... "The Other is back in New York," Cairns told her a moment later. "I saw him an hour before leaving, but not to speak to.... How strange it would be----"

Vina shook her head.

"Come back to New York with me to-day!" he said suddenly. "Our friends are there. You wouldn't trust anyone to pack the panels you'll need for work here.... Then we'll come back together for the long summer's work--will you?"

"Yes."

There was a quick step below--not the step of the man of flowers. Vina glanced at Cairns, who was smiling.

"I've arranged for servants, of course," he said. "I think dinner is nearly ready.... The table wasn't set for maiden-aunts----"

"The long summer's work together----" she said, in an awed voice.

"But first, our dinner together--you and I--here--oh, Vina!"

"... But, David,... you said--dinner first!"

THIRTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER

BETH AND ADITH MALLORY

Beth Truba dreamed:

She had been traveling for days and years, over plains, through the rifts of high mountains, across rivers and through great lonely silences, with just a dog for a companion. A white dog with small black spots, very playful and enduring, and though not large, he was very brave to contend with all that was fearful. At night he curled up close to her and licked her hand, and in the morning before the weary hours, he played about and made her laugh.

They came at last to a great desert. There was no other way, but to cross, if she hoped ever to reach her journey's end.... On and on, through the burning brightness they went, forgetting their hunger in the greater thirst. The nights were dreadful with a drying, dust-laden wind, and the days with destroying brilliance. At length one mid-day, the dog could go no further.

He sat down upon his haunches and looked at her, his tail brushing the sand--eyes melting with love for her. She put her hand upon his head, and the dry tongue touched her fingers.... She must leave him. He seemed to understand that she must go on; his eyes told her his sufferings--in that he could not be with her. And so she went on alone.

When she turned he was watching, but he had sunk down upon the sand. Only his head was raised a little. Still she saw the softness of the eyes; and his ears, that had been so sharp in the happy days, had dropped close about his head.

On she went, looking back, until the spot on the sand where he lay was gone from her eyes. And she knew what it meant to be alone. The days were blazing, and the nights filled with anguish to die. At last her hour came.... So glad she was to sink down a last time and let the night cover her.... But the sound of running water--water splashing musically upon the stones, and the breath of flowers--awoke her after many hours. A cooling dawn was abroad, and in the lovely light she saw low trees ahead--green palms around a fountain--fruits and shade and flowers.... She arose, and from her limbs all weariness was gone. There was a quick bark, and her dog came bounding up--and Beth awoke, thinking it was her soul that had returned to her, restored.

* * * * *

Beth realized that she had half-expected Bedient to re-enter that open door.... Reflecting upon the days, she found that he had done none of the things she had half-expected. Only, while she had believed herself comparatively unresponsive, he had filled her with a deep, silent inrushing. One by one he had swept away the ramparts which the world had builded before her heart. So softly and perfectly had he fitted his nature to her inner conception that she had not been roused in time. But the Shadowy Sister had known him for her prince of playmates.... She wondered how she could have been so wilful and so blind with her painter's strong eyes. Even her pride had betrayed her. Wordling and the ocean could not continue to stand against all the good he had shown her.

Beth had run away for a few days. She could not bear her mother's eyes, nor the studio where he had been. Better the house of strangers, two hours from New York up the Hudson.... She heard he had gone back to his Island.... The June days drowsed. The mid-days were slow to come to as far hills; and endless to pass as hills that turn into ranges. The sloping afternoons were æon-long; and centuries of toil were told in the hum of the bees about her window, toil to be done over and over again; and sometimes from the murmur of the bees, would appear to her like a swiftly-flung scroll, glimpses of her other lives, filled like this with endless waiting--for she was always a woman. And for what was she waiting?...

Often she thought of what Bedient had said about the women who refuse the bowl of porridge, and who therefore do not leave their children to brighten the race. These he had called the centres of new and radiant energy, the spiritual mothers of the race. And one night she cried aloud: "Would one be less a spiritual help, because she had a little of her own heart's desire? Because she held the highest office of woman, would her outer radiance be dimmed? To be a spiritual mother, why must she be just a passing influence or inspiration--a cheer for those who stop a moment to refresh themselves from her little cup, and hurry on about their own near and dear affairs, in which she has no share?... He stands in a big, bright garden and commands the spiritual mother to remain a waif out on the dusty highway. 'How much better off you are out there!' he says. 'You can show people the Gate, and keep them from going the wrong way, on the long empty road. Nothing can hurt you, but yourself. It is very foolish of _you_ to want to come in!'"...

She remembered that some fine thing had lit his eyes like stars at the parting. Time came when she wished she had seen him at the studio, or at her mother's house, when he called before going away.... The sharp irony of her success brought tears--and Beth Truba was rather choice of her tears. The portrait had made a stir at the Club, and the papers were discussing it gravely.

It brought back the days in which he had come to the studio, and what it had meant to her for him to move in and out. How dependent she had become upon his giving! The imperishable memories of her life had arisen from those days, while she painted his portrait. Beth realized this now--days of strange achievement under his eyes--errant glimpses of life's inner beauty--moments in which she had felt the power to paint even that delicate and fleeting shimmer of sunlight about a humming-bird's wing, so intense was her vision--their talks, and the ride--well she knew that these would be the lights of her flagging eyes--treasures of the old Beth, whose pictures all were painted.