He roused himself, for the night was passing. The last twinkling
lights--the lights which he had been almost--unconsciously watching in
the valley below him--had gone.
But one steady star remained. That came from the room where she lay
dead. It seemed incredible. Such sudden endings to all things came
into life sometimes, of course; still why should they come into his?
It was unfair. He risked everything on this one stake. Bit by bit he
had given up everything else. He had chased love to the outside edge
of the world, and now--it had gone over the verge.
He stood up and stretched himself, wondering vaguely how he had passed
the last few hours. He had slept for a while, he knew. That was at the
beginning, after he had gone down to the hollow where they had sat
together, and where he had planted the iris by the side of the
narcissus which was too proud to look for its fellow in the
earth-bounded pool at its feet. It had amused him--yes! positively
amused him--to dig holes for the bulbs with his pen-knife, and make a
grave--long and narrow like the window-sill--just such a grave as he
remembered on hill and dale at Kashmir. And it was not an empty grave
either; for he had buried in it the violets and the primroses, the
lilies of the valley and all things sweet.
In that first hour he must have been almost crazy with grief.
But then, he remembered, he had lain down half-hidden by the
hyacinths, dog-tired in mind and body to sleep a dreamless sleep. Then
he had come and watched the lights until it should be dark enough for
the night to bring disguise.
Now it had come, and it was time to be going.
Whither?
As if that mattered! He had come prepared for a secret journey, and
there was a hundred pounds odd in his pocket. The thought made him
smile bitterly. So far as outward circumstances stood, he was in
exactly the same position as he had been two years ago when he and Ted
had first met in a bicycle smash. In exactly the same position since
what was there to prevent his turning up at New Park in a few days,
and resuming his life as Lord Blackborough? There was nothing to
prevent it since the deed of gift could stand, of course; nothing but
his utter weariness. It would be better to start afresh.
He looked at his watch. Yes! it was time he was off. He would walk
down the coast road to Pot-afon; thence take the cargo steamer to
Liverpool. All roads meet there. He would go off to the wilds
somewhere, and after a year if--if nothing changed--he could easily
fabricate his own death, and let the heir come into what he did not
want.
He set off for his night walk cheerfully enough. The glamour of that
past day was upon him still, he seemed to hear her voice saying for
him "It has been quite perfect." In reality those had been her last
words, since the cry "the child! the child!" had been wrung from her
by chance--by one of the unhappy chances and changes of this most
unhappy world.
"It has been quite perfect." Ay! perhaps, but in the past tense. What
of the present?
He paused at the bridge below the village where the mountain stream
joined the river Afon, to look down to the still pool below the arch.
In the moonlight it looked very quiet. One might sleep there without
dreams if people would only leave one alone, but they would not. He
leant over the parapet and smiled at the oddness of one hive of
swarming atoms, objecting to another hive of atoms choosing the hollow
of a pool wherein to rest, interfering to fish it up and put it
somewhere else in order to disintegrate into atoms again.
And after the atoms? There lay the question. The atom and the human
consciousness? Were not both an equal mystery born of the unity
beyond?
As he stood there absorbed in thought the sound of rapid footsteps
echoed down the steep road from Dinas and, not wishing to be seen, he
stepped back at once into the shadow of a tree that overhung the
bridge. Looking up the roadway he saw a woman's figure. She was
running swiftly with a curious unevenness, a curious uncertainty, yet
evidently with some set purpose. As she passed him he caught a glimpse
of her face, and--mere hive of atoms though he was--he started after
her in a second.
None too soon either! He had just had hold of her in time, as she
wavered for an instant on the parapet.
"You young fool!" he said roughly. "What's the matter? What are you
doing that for?"
The girl--she did not look more than twenty--stared at him vacantly as
if she did not understand what he meant, then with a little cry of
horror apparently at herself, covered her face with her hands, and
crouched down beneath his touch in a perfect storm of sobs.
"Don't cry!" he said more kindly, "What is it all about? What were you
going to do?"
"I--I don't know," she wept. "It--it came upon me suddenly that it was
the only way--it swept me off my feet--oh! wicked, wicked girl that I
am--if--if it hadn't been for you--Oh! what shall I do? What shall I
do?"
"What's wrong?" he asked, impatient at her helpless emotion. "Anything
I can help? Come! it's no use crying. Of course you're a wicked girl,
but as you evidently don't really want to kill yourself you'll have to
live. So you had better make a clean breast of it. I daresay I can
help--if it isn't----" Her face looked innocent and pure, still one
never could tell. "Come--out with it"--he went on--"If it's anything
about money----"
She caught at the word. "Money! Oh! if I could only get the money,"
she wailed.
"Come!" he said with a smile, "if it is only money----"
So by degrees she told him her name was Alicia Edwards. She was the
happiest, luckiest girl in the world, who was to be married in two
days to the man she loved--to a saint upon earth. And she bore an
unblemished character. And her father was also a saint upon earth. But
that very evening by the post had come--not a bolt from the blue--for
she had had an awful prescience that it would come, though who would
have thought that Myfanwy would be so cruel, and she just married to
the man she loved! Oh! it was wicked! A bill, and such a bill too! A
hundred and three pounds; and if it was not paid for at once it would
be sent. Oh! she would go mad with shame.
"What was it for?" asked Ned, wearily good-natured.
"That is it," wailed poor Alicia, "it is for hats and dresses. And I
ought to have paid. And what am I, a minister's wife, to ask him to
pay such bills. And my father will not. What am I to do? If I was a
bad girl it would be nothing; but I am good, so very good! I cannot
face them saying I am bad."
"They would have said you were mad, I suppose, if you had jumped from
the bridge just now," said Ned grimly.
Alicia looked at him furtively and wept again.
What a world it was, thought Ned bitterly. Here was a well-educated,
deeply-religious girl occupied entirely in thinking what her
neighbours would say of her; those neighbours who, in a way, were as
responsible as she. For was not humanity, as a whole, responsible for
all the deeds of humanity. Was he not, in a way, responsible for his
own birth, being as he was, but the outcome of his forefathers? Virtue
and vice, honour and dishonour, were they not all hidden in that first
Step of dancing Prakrit? So there came to him for once a great
humility, a patient acceptance of all the evil in the world as being
part of himself.
"I will give you the money, child," he said; "you shall marry the
saint and be a saint yourself--why not?"
"I can't--I can't take it," she muttered, for all that holding fast to
the purse he gave her; "I can't take it from a stranger."
"A stranger?" he echoed. "Bah! In the beginning, little girl, you and
I were one. Remember that in all your little life. As it was in the
beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end--Amen!"
He stooped and kissed her as he left her at her father's door, and she
stood looking after him, wondering if he were indeed a man or a
vision. But the money was there. A hundred pounds in notes and three
sovereigns. She would send them by the morning's post to Myfanwy Pugh,
and then----
Alicia Edwards fell on her knees beside her bed and thanked God for
the money.
Meanwhile Ned Blackborough had paused to re-make his plans in his new
condition of pennilessness; for he had but a few shillings left for
the immediate present. Afterwards there was money and to spare
awaiting him at various points on the route which he had carefully
prepared for flight. Still he must first get to a point.
Then the remembrance of the hundred pounds he had hidden away in the
cleft of the rock up on the hills came to him, making him laugh;
because there was no question now as to who needed it. He came back to
it a beggar; beggared, indeed, of all save life. Yet life was all. The
words of the Indian sage came back to him:--
"Indestructible the life is, spreading life thro' all.
I say to Thee weapons reach not the life.
Flame burns it not, waters cannot overwhelm
Nor dry winds wither it. Impenetrable,
Unentered, unassailed, unharmed, untouched,
Immortal, all arriving, stable, sure,
Thus is the Life declared."
Vaguely he felt comforted. The sense of Unity lay around him in the
air. He saw the Golden Gateway. He knew that its Door was open. But
his love kept him from entering. He could yield himself without one
sigh to the Beginning that was the End, but he could not yield her,
for he had not yet realised that she also was the Beginning, the End.
The dawn was just breaking as he reached the gap, and searching in the
cleft found nothing.
Was he glad, or was he sorry? He was not sure. In a way he felt more
free, since he need now have no plans for the future. He could sit
down and watch the sun rise. After that he could walk over
Llwydd-y-Bryd to the coastline by the country town, and so--anywhere!
This was sufficient, surely, for the moment.
The sun rose in a panoply of purple and red with, low down above the
hills, a band or two of torquoise blue to hint of the vast fields of
calm ether beyond the storm clouds of the world.
"Aura! Aura! Aura!"
Even there, to the far, unending depths, the cry echoed. A cry apart,
poignant with individual anguish.
He started up and moved on. The staghorn moss trailed clinging to the
soil beneath his feet, a hawk hovering in the air was held to its
place also by the same force which sent the world on which he stood,
spinning on its way. But still that love, that grief of his, would not
be made one with Nature.
"Aura! Aura! Aura!"
He stood on the summit of Llydd-y-Bryd once more. Even the
"gingerbeer" had gone from the shieling now; but it would not be long
before humanity returned once more with placard and paste-pot to
appropriate the spot to base uses.
Down in the blue hollow yonder lay Cwmfaernog, and in Cwmfaernog
lay--no! not Aura! Aura was of the woods and hills. He could feel her
in them separate, distinct from himself. He would not give her up; he
could not. He would give one more look at the peaceful little valley
from the crag yonder, and then take her with him; something he would
not yield, not even to the Force which held the round world sure.
The round world perhaps--but--ye Gods!
His foot slipped, he caught at a root to save himself, it gave way--he
fell.
The hot noon-tide sun was beating down on him when he woke to
consciousness again. He tried to move, and could not. After a time his
mind returned clearly; he pinched himself upon the thigh and felt
nothing. That, then, was the reason why he felt no pain, for one of
his legs was evidently broken. He had injured his spine, and it was
paralysed below the waist. This, then, was the end.
"Aura! Aura!"
His heart leapt up in him. It could not be long now.
He was lying in the corrie into which he and Ted had vainly tried to
get that first night of the storm, and as he lay he could watch the
sun tilt from its high glory in the heavens, to touch the world in the
west then disappear. It would be a beautiful sunset. How many more
would he see, he wondered. How long would it last? Some days perhaps.
How idle all things--money, happiness, even love itself seemed beside
this certainty of leaving them all. The only thing that money had
brought to him was the death of a wild animal--thank God!--alone!
Except for Aura.
Aura! Aura! Aura!
Yes! she had been right. Love like his needed nothing. It could
exist--nay! grow to greater strength without trivialities. They were
beyond the Shadow of the Night now; nothing could touch them again.
They would go on and on....
That night he slept a little under the stars, and in his dreams he saw
her walking amid the drifts of iris leading a little child by the
hand. Her face was sad, and as he tried to comfort her, his eyes
opened; and lo! it was dawn once more.
A primrose dawn, with little faint, far grey clouds just flecking the
wide waste of gold.
"It was quite perfect."
Her words came back to him. She was wrong. The part could not be
perfect, and what were they, their griefs, their joys, their loves,
but part of the great whole.
His mind was beginning to wander a little, and in the high noon tide
he slept to dream that he saw the little child alone. Her head was
crowned with iris flowers, her feet were among them, her eyes were
violet and white as they were. They looked into his. "Mother says you
have no right," came her childish voice. "I am the immortality of the
race. Die and forget her. Die and forget all things."
When he awoke, a raven, perched on a rock hard by, cawed hoarsely, and
flapped lazily away to watch from a greater distance.
A few drops of water trickled from the rock close beside him. He had
hollowed out a little cup for it with his hand and drank of it from
time to time. Now he poured some of it on his head which had begun to
ache. What use was there in prolonging the agony? The sooner it was
over the better. He searched in his pockets for any scrap of paper
which might betray him, and, tearing them up, dug them toilfully into
the ground, almost amusing himself in restoring the spot to perfect
homogeneity with its surroundings.
His gold signet ring he flung away into the little pool, which,
collecting the surface drainage of the very summit, brimmed up below
the rock to overflow in a tiny stream. He tried to make a duck and
drake of it as his last contribution to the sovereign remedy, but he
failed, and he smiled at his failure.
He was becoming very much detached, even from himself, and the one
thing to which he clung was the memory of his love.
Aura! Aura! Aura!
He must find her somewhere; and she seemed so close! Sometimes he
wondered if she were not there, in his eyes, in his heart.
"Aura," he murmured to himself; "Aura!"
That night he slept dreamlessly. And when he opened his eyes, lo!
there was a Sea of Light. The great shining arch of the sky seemed to
him the golden gate; the open door lay behind him. He was on the other
side. He had found himself and her as they had been always, not as a
part but as the whole.
"_Tad ek am_," he thought, realising with a rush that He was All
Things, and that All Things were in Him. So, as he lay gazing, the
round sun rose gloriously, and he sank into unconsciousness.
* * * * *
When he awoke it was to find himself in a work-house infirmary; a
long, bare room set in a straight row with beds. Some hive of atoms
must have found him on the mountain-top and brought him to die here.
Well! it could not be for long. There was a black screen folded up,
ready for use, at the foot of the bed. He knew what that meant; but
nothing seemed to matter now that he had passed the open door to lose
and find Himself.
"Only those who lose can find." His mind, blurred, confused, lingered
over this certainty.
"He is conscious," said a voice beside him, and a face, dark,
curiously eager, bent over him. It was Morris Pugh's. Walking over the
hills that morning on his way to Caeron, the county town, he had come
upon Ned Blackborough, had summoned help, and brought him to the
infirmary. And now, although having seen him but once in his life, he
had failed to recognise the light-hearted maker of ducks-and-drakes in
the worn, unconscious man, so close to death, he longed with all the
eagerness that was in him, that, ere he had to leave him to death, he
might have the chance of saying some word for the Master. For these
eighteen months of hard, practical work in the slums of London while
they had sobered Morris Pugh, had left him still ardent.
"Hullo!" said Ned weakly. "I've seen you before somewhere--haven't I?"
He paused, and some one gave him another spoonful of stimulant. He
wondered vaguely why he took it, since death must come; but it was as
well to please people--if you could. "I remember now," he went on, as
if he were recalling it from very far away. "It was when we hid the
hundred pounds. You were the parson who said, 'Money was the root of
all evil.'" He gave a ghost of a smile, then looked into the dark eyes
curiously. "I suppose you took it?"
Morris Pugh flushed at the very memory of that never-to-be-forgotten
search for God's providence on the mountain-top.
"So it was you who made the ducks and drakes--I remember," he said
slowly. "No! I did not take it; but--but I looked for it, and it was
gone."
"Gone," echoed Ned, and lay thinking.
"Then it must have been Ted who took it," he murmured, going back
into the past. "He must have gone that midsummer night--why, yes! of
course----" Then suddenly his dulled mind grasped the whole sequence of
events. "He--and Hirsch--that is how he got Aura--my money--damn him!"
"Hush!" came Morris Pugh's voice sternly. "You stand too close to the
judgment yourself for curses----"
"I--I will say bless him, if that suits you better," murmured Ned
wearily. "And if you don't mind--I prefer to stand alone."
"No man can stand alone before the judgment seat of God," pleaded
Morris Pugh earnestly. "I do not know what your life has been, but the
best of us need an advocate; and there is One."
"My life?" echoed Ned dreamily. "I want to forget my life--not to talk
about it--if you would go--and leave me." Then he opened his eyes
again. "Did you bring me here?"
"Yes! I brought you--I found you unconscious. But there is One who
will bring you safe into the fold."
"I wonder if you would--be kind enough to let me--die alone."
"Alone!" echoed Morris Pugh. "You can never be alone. And even for
this world, would you not like us to call your friends--to let them
know?"
"I--I have my friends," he answered; "I want--nothing."
So after whispering about him regretfully, they left him for a while,
and he lay staring at a ray of sunlight which slanted through the
window at the further end of the ward, and fell, in a golden glory,
upon an empty bed. If it had only fallen upon his!
Gold! Yes! everything was gold in this world. How people fought for
it, selling their souls, their bodies for it! yet how little it meant.
A hideous mockery, indeed, was this Christian greed of gold. And yet
money meant much--Ted--damn him!
"Mate," came a voice from the next bed, where a tramp, hollow-eyed,
unshaven, who was recovering from an attack of pneumonia, had lain
listening, coughing. "'Tain't no business o' mine in a way, but there
ain't no good your lyin' an' damnin' a man as ain't done you no 'arm.
'Tain't in a way fair on you for me ter let you go to 'ell over a lie.
It's the rumm'est start as I sh'ud be 'ere, but--ye see, Ted--'ooever
'e may be--didn't take that 'undred--I took it."
"You!" he said faintly.
"Me!" echoed the tramp. "It's--it's the rumm'est start; but--you
see I was on the lay atwixt Blackborough an' Liverpool.
Outer-work-an'-emigration lay it 'twas, an' not a bad one in the
summer time, for them Welsh is generous. I was asleep in the gorse
close by when you two come by an' smashed. Then you begun shieing the
shiners about, an' I waited thinkin' to get some of 'em out after
you'd gone. An' I did too, what with bein' able to dive. But there!
The 'ole thing wasn't much worth; not more than one good drunk, an'
then it was over. But don't you go a-lyin' an' damnin' the wrong
fellar. It was me, not 'im; so curse me an' welcome if it do you any
good."
He rolled over on his pillow, and said no more.
Ned lay still, and smiled inwardly. His mind was clouding fast. He
felt vaguely glad that Ted had not taken the money. But, then, how
could he have taken it, seeing that it had never existed? They had all
thought of it, and relied on it, and gone to look for it; and there
was nothing. It never had been anything but a dream.
The gold sun-ray had crept down the ward. It lay now closer to him. If
he could only die in the sunlight! That was the only gold worth
having.
How the atoms danced in it! unceasing, endless. He felt their
vibration in himself, but beyond the dancer lay sightlessness, and
touchlessness, and soundlessness.
Faint voices came to him from around his bed.
"There is time yet! Repent and be saved. Put your trust in Him! Keep
your eyes fixed on Him--remember that you are bought with a price."
There was just the flicker of a faint courteous smile.
"_Caveat Emptor_," murmured the dying man, and turned his face to the
sun-ray. "Aura!" he murmured. "_Tad ek am_."
The sun--ray shifted, crept to his bed, and lay there, golden.