XI

I descended into the valley; the armed men followed. The path, on

that side of the water course not reached by the flames, wound

through meadows still green, or amidst groves still unscathed. As

a turning in the way brought in front of my sight the place I had

left behind, I beheld the black litter creeping down the descent,

with its curtains closed, and the Veiled Woman walking by its side.

But soon the funeral procession was lost to my eyes, and the

thoughts that it roused were erased. The waves in man's brain are

like those of the sea, rushing on, rushing over the wrecks of the

vessels that rode on their surface, to sink, after storm, in their

deeps. One thought cast forth into the future now mastered all in

the past: "Was Lilian living still?" Absorbed in the gloom of that

thought, hurried on by the goad that my heart, in its tortured

impatience, gave to my footstep, I outstripped the slow stride of

the armed men, and, midway between the place I had left and the

home which I sped to, came, far in advance of my guards, into the

thicket in which the Bushmen had started up in my path on the night

that Lilian had watched for my coming. The earth at my feet was

rife with creeping plants and many-colored flowers, the sky

overhead was half hid by motionless pines. Suddenly, whether

crawling out from the herbage or dropping down from the trees, by

my side stood the white-robed and skeleton form--Ayesha's attendant

the Strangler.

I sprang from him shuddering, then halted and faced him. The

hideous creature crept toward me, cringing and fawning, making

signs of humble goodwill and servile obeisance. Again I recoiled--

wrathfully, loathingly, turned my face homeward, and fled on. I

thought I had baffled his chase, when, just at the mouth of the

thicket, he dropped from a bough in my path close behind me.

Before I could turn, some dark muffling substance fell between my

sight and the sun, and I felt a fierce strain at my throat. But

the words of Ayesha had warned me; with one rapid hand I seized the

noose before it could tighten too closely, with the other I tore

the bandage away from my eyes, and, wheeling round on the dastardly

foe, struck him down with one spurn of my foot. His hand, as he

fell, relaxed its hold on the noose; I freed my throat from the

knot, and sprang from the copse into the broad sunlit plain. I saw

no more of the armed men or the Strangler. Panting and breathless,

I paused at last before the fence, fragrant with blossoms, that

divided my home from the solitude.

The windows of Lilian's room were darkened; all within the house

seemed still.

Darkened and silenced home, with the light and sounds of the jocund

day all around it. Was there yet hope in the Universe for me? All

to which I had trusted Hope had broken down; the anchors I had

forged for her hold in the beds of the ocean, her stay from the

drifts of the storm, had snapped like the reeds which pierce the

side that leans on the barb of their points, and confides in the

strength of their stems. No hope in the baffled resources of

recognized knowledge! No hope in the daring adventures of Mind

into regions unknown; vain alike the calm lore of the practiced

physician, and the magical arts of the fated Enchanter! I had fled

from the commonplace teachings of Nature, to explore in her

Shadowland marvels at variance with reason. Made brave by the

grandeur of love, I had opposed without quailing the stride of the

Demon, and my hope, when fruition seemed nearest, had been trodden

into dust by the hoofs of the beast! And yet, all the while, I had

scorned, as a dream, more wild than the word of a sorcerer, the

hope that the old man and the child, the wise and the ignorant,

took from their souls as inborn. Man and fiend had alike failed a

mind, not ignoble, not skill-less, not abjectly craven; alike

failed a heart not feeble and selfish, not dead to the hero's

devotion, willing to shed every drop of its blood for a something

more dear than an animal's life for itself! What remained--what

remained for man's hope?--man's mind and man's heart thus

exhausting their all with no other result but despair! What

remained but the mystery of mysteries, so clear to the sunrise of

childhood, the sunset of age, only dimmed by the clouds which

collect round the noon of our manhood? Where yet was Hope found?

In the soul; in its every-day impulse to supplicate comfort and

light, from the Giver of soul, wherever the heart is afflicted, the

mind is obscured.

Then the words of Ayesha rushed over me: "What mourner can be

consoled, if the dead die forever?" Through every pulse of my

frame throbbed that dread question; all Nature around seemed to

murmur it. And suddenly, as by a flash from heaven, the grand

truth in Faber's grand reasoning shone on me, and lighted up all,

within and without. Man alone, of all earthly creatures, asks,

"Can the dead die forever?" and the instinct that urges the

question is God's answer to man. No instinct is given in vain.

And born with the instinct of soul is the instinct that leads the

soul from the seen to the unseen, from time to eternity, from the

torrent that foams toward the Ocean of Death, to the source of its

stream, far aloft from the Ocean.

"Know thyself," said the Pythian of old. "That precept descended

from Heaven." Know thyself! Is that maxim wise? If so, know thy

soul. But never yet did man come to the thorough conviction of

soul but what he acknowledged the sovereign necessity of prayer.

In my awe, in my rapture, all my thoughts seemed enlarged and

illumed and exalted. I prayed--all my soul seemed one prayer. All

my past, with its pride and presumption and folly, grew distinct as

the form of a penitent, kneeling for pardon before setting forth on

the pilgrimage vowed to a shrine. And, sure now, in the deeps of a

soul first revealed to myself, that the Dead do not die forever, my

human love soared beyond its brief trial of terror and sorrow.

Daring not to ask from Heaven's wisdom that Lilian, for my sake,

might not yet pass away from the earth, I prayed that my soul might

be fitted to bear with submission whatever my Maker might ordain.

And if surviving her--without whom no beam from yon material sun

could ever warm into joy a morrow in human life--so to guide my

steps that they might rejoin her at last, and in rejoining, regain

forever!

How trivial now became the weird riddle, that, a little while

before, had been clothed in so solemn an awe! What mattered it to

the vast interests involved in the clear recognition of Soul and

Hereafter, whether or not my bodily sense, for a moment, obscured

the face of the Nature I should one day behold as a spirit?

Doubtless the sights and the sounds which had haunted the last

gloomy night, the calm reason of Faber would strip of their magical

seemings; the Eyes in the space and the Foot in the circle might be

those of no terrible Demons, but of the wild's savage children whom

I had seen, halting, curious and mute, in the light of the morning.

The tremor of the ground (if not, as heretofore, explicable by the

illusory impression of my own treacherous senses) might be but the

natural effect of elements struggling yet under a soil unmistakably

charred by volcanoes. The luminous atoms dissolved in the caldron

might as little be fraught with a vital elixir as are the splendors

of naphtha or phosphor. As it was, the weird rite had no magic

result. The magician was not rent limb from limb by the fiends.

By causes as natural as ever extinguished life's spark in the frail

lamp of clay, he had died out of sight--under the black veil.

What mattered henceforth to Faith, in its far grander questions and

answers, whether Reason, in Faber, or Fancy, in me, supplied the

more probable guess at a hieroglyph which, if construed aright, was

but a word of small mark in the mystical language of Nature? If

all the arts of enchantment recorded by Fable were attested by

facts which Sages were forced to acknowledge, Sages would sooner or

later find some cause for such portents--not supernatural. But

what Sage, without cause supernatural, both without and within him,

can guess at the wonders he views in the growth of a blade of

grass, or the tints on an insect's wing? Whatever art Man can

achieve in his progress through time, Man's reason, in time, can

suffice to explain. But the wonders of God? These belong to the

Infinite; and these, O Immortal! will but develop new wonder on

wonder, though thy sight be a spirit's, and thy leisure to track

and to solve an eternity.

As I raised my face from my clasped hands, my eyes fell full upon a

form standing in the open doorway. There, where on the night in

which Lilian's long struggle for reason and life had begun, the

Luminous Shadow had been beheld in the doubtful light of a dying

moon and a yet hazy dawn; there, on the threshold, gathering round

her bright locks the aureole of the glorious sun, stood Amy, the

blessed child! And as I gazed, drawing nearer and nearer to the

silenced house, and that Image of Peace on its threshold, I felt

that Hope met me at the door--Hope in the child's steadfast eyes,

Hope in the child's welcoming smile!

"I was at watch for you," whispered Amy. "All is well."

"She lives still--she lives! Thank God, thank God!"

"She lives--she will recover!" said another voice, as my head sunk

on Faber's shoulder. "For some hours in the night her sleep was

disturbed, convulsed. I feared, then, the worst. Suddenly, just

before the dawn, she called out aloud, still in sleep:

"'The cold and dark shadow has passed away from me and from Allen--

passed away from us both forever!'

"And from that moment the fever left her; the breathing became

soft, the pulse steady, and the color stole gradually back to her

cheek. The crisis is past. Nature's benign Disposer has permitted

Nature to restore your life's gentle partner, heart to heart, mind

to mind--"

"And soul to soul," I cried in my solemn joy. "Above as below,

soul to soul!" Then, at a sign from Faber, the child took me by

the hand and led me up the stairs into Lilian's room.

Again those dear arms closed around me in wifelike and holy love,

and those true lips kissed away my tears--even as now, at the

distance of years from that happy morn, while I write the last

words of this Strange Story, the same faithful arms close around

me, the same tender lips kiss away my tears.