_By_ KATHARINE PRESCOTT MOSELEY
From _Scribner’s Magazine_
_Copyright, 1918, by Charles Scribner’s Sons._
_Copyright, 1919, by Katharine Prescott Moseley._
“There is only one letter for you,” said Ware’s sister, and she turned
the handle of the coffee-urn as she watched him slit the envelope, for
Ware had exclaimed: “By Jove! It’s from Vinton.” And then, after a
moment: “That’s a nice thing. Roberts posted this last night instead of
telephoning it up directly it came. He’s on the _——nia_, due in New
York—let me see—you have the _Herald_ there—look in the shipping, will
you? Are they sighted?”
Abigail took up the paper. “Docked last night at nine,” she said.
“Then he’ll have caught the midnight from New York. If he’s not stopping
in Boston he’ll be on the eight fifty-eight.”
“Is he coming here?”
“Yes, he says so. He’ll have quite a bit to tell if I know him.” And an
hour or so later Abigail Ware saw Vinton lift his eyes to the columns of
the white porch glistening in the morning sun behind her, and as he
sprang out of the motor and took her hand: “My foot is on my native
heath and my name is MacGregor!” he cried.
Abigail led the way into the dining-room. “Come in by the fire; I’ve
kept some coffee hot,” she said.
Vinton approached the warmth of the pine logs that were sending out
sparks against the screen of the Franklin stove. “There’s something
fearfully penetrating about the air over here at this time of year,” he
began. “Open fires are its saving complement.”
Abigail held out his cup.
“Warm as toast in England; perfect English spring this year.”
“Oh, no doubt of it; spring’s the time for England,” Ware asserted.
“Fall for New England,” said Ware’s sister. “But tell me,” she went on,
“you were talking of saving complements. What are the saving complements
over there just now?”
“There aren’t any.” Vinton’s voice was suddenly sombre.
“I should think not!” It came from brother and sister at once.
A moment passed before Vinton turned from the fire and let his eyes
wander from the pale yellow heads of the daffodils nodding in the
easterly May air outside to the cool tints of the Lowestoft bowl on
which some Chinese artisan a century before had picked out the initials
of a merchant-sailor grandfather in pale tints of blue and gold and
which now stood in the centre of the table filled with sprays of the
rhodora. “Yes,” he said slowly, “I suppose there are saving complements
of a sort if one is heroic enough to find them, but—well, one can
hardly— What shall I say? Everything over there—I mean all sorts of what
you’d call merely material objects—is being charged, I believe, with
some kind of spiritual essence that is going to be indefinitely active
to future contact.”
He looked across the table to where Ware sat with his chair a little
pushed back, and laughed. “The intolerant old Puritan thinks I’m off
again, doesn’t he?” he said almost archly. Then he glanced about the
room once more. “I think,” he continued, “that there is an extraordinary
beauty of a kind about our old houses over here—a charm, too, although
I’ve never been able to analyze it, for, after all, you know, there’s
nothing in them!”
“The Puritan,” he began to explain, “belonged peculiarly to the race
that in England had always opposed all of what one may call the sensory
elements that were of such immense appeal to the race of the Cavaliers,
for I believe that the two did spring from essentially different roots.
“‘A primrose by a river’s brim
A yellow primrose was to him,
And it was nothing more.’”
“What more does it need to be?” Ware protested, and “Ah! there you are,”
Vinton responded. “But don’t you see, after all, such negation never
created”—he laughed a little again. “Never created an—an—”
“An eschatology?” supplemented Ware.
“A what? What on earth’s an eschatology?” gasped Ware’s sister.
“Say, for brevity, the material manifestation of spiritual things; not
quite theological, but ’t will serve,” Vinton returned, and was silent;
and after a time Abigail asked him what he thought of the legend of the
Angel of Mons. Then it was that Vinton began to be truly cryptic.
“What’s the use,” he said genially, “of talking about these things to
two people who are made of stuff as splendidly solid and insensitive to
the vibrations of what they’d call fantasy as their colonial pieces
themselves.”
Abigail sighed. “I’m sorry that I’m too insensitive to hear of these
saving complements of horror,” she said. “As for Billy, I suppose he
wants the facts.”
“The horror,” returned Vinton, “for the facts are all horror. If it
hadn’t been for the story that the Marquis of Mallorie’s daughter told
me I should bring home nothing else.”
“Is this one of those manifestations you refuse to reveal to us?”
“It is the only one. It’s no use before Ware; perhaps some time—if you
will listen.”
“Go on,” said Ware; “‘_si non e vero, e ben trovato_’”.
“Oh, I’m not making it up.”
“Well, what do they say about the Russian advance, over there? Did you
see any of the big German guns in action?”
For days after this the conversation turned on the technical questions
of war, with which Vinton’s opportunities as a war correspondent had
made him familiar.
Then one night Vinton had come down from Boston on a late afternoon
train. He had been lunching at one of the clubs with friends who had
listed him to speak at two or three houses in aid of emergency funds. It
was tea-time and suddenly he rose, with his cup and saucer in hand, and
went over to one of the dining-room windows. “Hello,” he said. “We’re
going to get a northeaster, I’ll be bound.”
“The sheep-shearer’s due,” said Ware from his desk.
And it was that very night, when the great easterly gale was enveloping
the whole New England coast and was sending showers of sparks down the
big fire-place before which they sat, in a low-ceiled room which had
been the kitchen in colonial days, that Vinton told the story as he had
heard it from the Marquis of Mallorie’s daughter.
――――
“It seems,” he began, “that the Mallories are of an immensely ancient
family in the southwest of England; the title is one of the oldest in
the realm, and one of the poorest. Away back in the time of the Tudor
they became Protestant under protest, and have remained so under
protest; only their chapel, like the worshipping places of the early
Christians, was taken down into the bosom of the earth and there it
rested, exhaling strange virtues over all the land above, and, as many
thought, harboring much of good that the newer order of things had cast
out. And so the Mallories are High-Church and when the Puseyites began
their revolt they were only approaching what the Mallories had been for
centuries. And about these delightful people there is none of the
fanaticism of the convert.
“When war broke out there were two beautiful daughters living, most of
their time, down there at Mallorie Abbey, and a son who went over with
the expeditionary force as soon as war was declared. This young man was
killed in action, under the most heroic circumstances. He was,
apparently, the type of young soldier who might have been one of
Arthur’s men, and I believe the clerical incumbent there used to quote
the lines of the Puritan Milton: ‘Arthur stirring wars under the earth
that hides him,’ or ‘Millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth
unseen,’ as having a kind of ironic application to the whole Mallorie
domain. When I came back from France I was pretty well used up, and
Carteret Lyon asked me down to his place, which stands within four or
five miles of Mallorie, in the south. They are, of course, in mourning
and fearfully sad, but I met the eldest daughter at tea one afternoon,
and, being the most natural people on earth, and as I could tell her
some things she wished to hear about France, we became almost friends at
once. After that they made me welcome at Mallorie whenever I dropped in
at tea-time, and one day Lady Maurya took me over the abbey, telling me
as we went through the dim old place with its stained and mullioned
windows a lot of its curious, almost supernatural, history. Suddenly she
broke off from the narrative, on which it had seemed to me that her mind
had been only lightly fixed, and, sinking down on a window-seat in the
low, long hall we had been passing through, she looked up at me and
said: ‘Ah, this is nothing to something that has really happened here
within the year.’
“I asked her if she could tell me, and she answered that she wished to,
but that it was all so very extraordinary that she feared I would be
unable to believe it, and she felt that she could not hear it doubted.
“I said to her that I was the most believing man since the Dark Ages,
and so she told me.
“It was the anniversary of her brother’s death, and a quarter to three
in the morning had just struck from the clock on a kind of tower that
rises over the chapel and which has a circular stairway running down
into the middle of a small lady-chapel where her brother’s body (which
had finally been found after the engagement in which he had been killed)
had been buried. She and the other members of her family were keeping
vigil beside the tomb by turns while masses were being said, during the
twelve hours that were passing, and she was just mounting the stairs to
go to her room for a little rest, being nearly exhausted with fatigue
and emotion, when suddenly the tower and stairway, which had been in
inky darkness before, became as light as day. She knew in an instant
what it was, and, looking up, straight over her head she saw a Zeppelin
hovering exactly above where she stood and so low that it seemed to her
that she could see the crew and their preparations for the hideous work
afoot. Then she looked down and a single shaft of the search-light fell
directly on the heads of those who were gathered on their knees about
the tomb. They were praying, with their heads bent and their eyes
closed, for not one of them seemed to be aware of it, and the priests,
whose chanting came up to her fearfully from the altar, were protected
from it by the high reredos. There was something so dreadful and so
uncanny about it all that she was petrified, for she knew that
annihilation was hanging over her and all her family, without the shadow
of a doubt, for the aim was at the tower—which was a landmark for miles
around—and that it would fall before she could warn one of her people to
safety, when, as in a flash from nowhere, flying at a most terrific rate
of speed yet without a sound and straight at the Zeppelin, there
appeared an aeroplane. It approached almost within hailing distance of
the great thing without firing, and then, as the Zeppelin started a
little, the aeroplane began swirling about it. She could not tell how
long a battle went on between them without a single shot from either. It
seemed as if the aeroplane was winding the monster in some intangible
net, in which it turned and twisted and writhed, trying to get away into
the free air; and then, again without a single shot, it fell to earth.
“Every one of the crew had been killed when the men went out to it, and
while she and her sister watched from the top of the tower they saw the
aeroplane skim down and land just below them. Hastening below she threw
back a little door that opened to the ground, and there she came face to
face with the aeronaut. He wore no helmet, and, in this very early
light, for it was in the first days of the year, he looked as if he
stood in a shining black armor. His hair was golden, and the rising sun
touched it, and he was the most beautiful creature that she had ever
seen—so beautiful that she fell back against the wall behind her.
“Then the others came and showered him with thanks and insisted that he
should be their guest at Mallorie, and, to every one’s astonishment,
Lady Maurya’s mother called the man who had served her son for many
years and directed him to take the stranger to her son’s rooms, that had
not been open since the day he fell in battle, and also she said that as
they were of about the same height his wardrobe should be at the
stranger’s disposal. He accepted their invitation and stayed at Mallorie
Abbey for nearly a week, saying that there were a few things he must do
about his machine. And yet, during his whole stay, no one ever saw him
at work on it. In fact, although the Mallories never mentioned it to
him, they knew that there was much excitement, not only among their own
people but in the countryside, because since the moment he had come to
earth no one had been able to find the aeroplane. He would sometimes
play tennis with Lady Maurya and her sister the whole morning or
afternoon, and at sight of him in their brother’s flannels and with his
gayest kummerbunds and ties they felt no pangs, only a great comfort in
his presence, not exactly as if their brother was really back with them,
but as if he had power to fill them with the same sort of happiness they
had always felt when the young soldier was at home with them on leave.
“One night during that week a general officer back from France on an
important mission dined at the abbey. After dinner, something calling
the marquis out, the officer and the aeronaut, Lieutenant Templar, as he
called himself, were left alone. As the officer was bidding Lady Maurya
good-by, two hours later, he said: ‘This evening has been worth twenty
trips from France. I have learned that which may be of such value to us
that it will turn the tide of war. This young saviour of Mallorie Abbey
may be the saviour of Europe. But how does he _know_?’
“Then it was that Lady Maurya took Lieutenant Templar by himself, and
she brought him into the very hall where she told me the story, and she
said to him (and how could any creature of earth or heaven have resisted
her, for she has all the beauty and all the allurements of both?): ‘Why
were your wings all purple and gold when you came flying to save us that
morning?’
“And he answered her: ‘The shadow of the earth upon the skies, and a
touch of dawn.’
“‘But there was no dawn,’ she said. ‘And when you came to the great
monster why did your wings change to flaming scarlet, so bright that no
eyes could rest upon them?’
“‘The rising sun,’ he said.
“And she answered: ‘But there was no rising sun.’
“And then he looked at her for a long time while neither spoke, and at
last: ‘How could you send the thing to earth without a single shot?’ she
asked.
“And he answered, after a moment: ‘Because in me is all the strength of
that bright ardor which has led young warriors to die in battle for the
right since earth began. And now my strength is most mightily renewed
with the strength of all the lads who were the first to die for England.
Was not your brother one of these? Such souls are the stuff of which are
made the angels and archangels and all the heavenly host.’
“And as she looked at him, standing before her, it seemed to her, in the
dim light, that instead of the evening clothes he had been wearing she
saw again a glint of black armor as on the morning when he had first
come to them, and then, like Elsa, she asked him who he was, and he,
like Lohengrin, was gone.
“But from that day to this there has been no more sorrowing at Mallorie
Abbey.”
――――
The great northeaster had stopped its wild howling at the very moment
that Vinton was adding: “They have never known which of them it
was—whether it was Michael—or Gabriel—or Raphael!”
Ware poked the fire and said nothing.
“Do you believe it?” asked Ware’s sister.
“What an impossible word that word ‘believe’ is! What does it mean?”
“And do you like the idea—the idea of losing one’s identity in one great
superlative being like that?”
Vinton thought a moment, and then he said: “When I remember that all the
trouble on this earth comes in the train of that infernal thing we call
the ego it seems to me that the heavenly things must indeed arise from
its complete surrender. Yes,” he continued more slowly, “yes, I think I
like it very much.”