lamp-globes--were shadowy and unreal in the midst of these mystically
glowing conceptions.
The sense of perfect health came to him--a steady, rhythmic radiation;
not a tired, weak fibre, but a singing vitality of every tissue, as if
it were cushioned in some life-giving fluid--a pure perfumed bloom of
health.
Bedient turned upon the stair. He wanted no man-made room, but the
night and the hills and the skies.... Bare of head he went forth.
THIRTY-FOURTH CHAPTER
THE SUPREME ADVENTURE
The night was full of sounds, sights, odors, textures--that he had
never sensed before. He smelled the wild oranges from the hillsides,
and the raw coffee that lay drying on the great cane mats before the
native cabins. His limbs seemed lifted over the rocky ways; he loved
the dim contours in the starlight, and the breath of the sea that came
with the night-wind. The stars said, "Welcome," and the hills, "All is
well."
Mother Earth was lying out in more than starlight--but not asleep. She
was laughing, wise, sweet in eternal youth. Always she had been dear to
him, this Flesh Mother. Her storms and terrors she had shown, but never
harmed him. He loved her, sea and mountain and plain--_God-Mother_ and
the Kashmir border--the highway ride with the lustrous lady and its
sunshine--the path through the wood.... What a boy and girl they had
been! How he had loved her--and the day--how he had suffered for it!
And now Bedient knelt upon the stones, uplifted his hands to the
starlight, and cried in a low voice: "God bless Beth Truba, and help me
to bless her at every turning of her life! God bless Beth Truba for the
sensitizing sorrow she gave me, without which this hour could not have
been revealed to me!"
... He seemed to be leaping from crest to crest in an ocean of
happiness.... Some glorious magnetic Presence strode beside him. The
night quivered with mighty energies--strange brightenings flashed
before his eyes. He wanted nothing--but to give.... All was clear to
him. Immortality was here and now: This life but a hut upon the
headland of interminable continents, yet as much a part of immortality,
as the life of the star-clothed Master who blinded Saul on the road to
Damascus.
What a symphony--the flower, the star, the drop of rain, the rose, the
child, the harvest, the voice of love, the soul of Woman,--all from the
Luminary, God,--all His immortal symphony.
He was filled with light--as a still, clear harbor at high noon--gems
and treasure-horns flashing in the depths. He _realized_ God. This was
a ray of God that penetrated him--the spiritual essence "all science
transcending."
With joy, a sentence he had once heard returned, "Prayer is not
catching God's attention, but permitting him to hold ours!"... Faith
and truth are one; Faith is the scaffolding in which the structure of
Truth is builded; that which is Faith to us, is Truth to the angels....
As never before, he realized that wisdom comes from the inner light of
man, and not from the comprehension of externals.... He knew now the
meaning of ecstasy on the faces of the dying, and remembered with
confusion and alarm that men of this day were afraid of Death!... How
much more should they fear birth--birth, the ordeal of the soul--the
putting on of flesh. Great souls put on flesh to hasten the way of
their younger brothers to the Shining Tablelands. That is pure
Spirit--to lift the weak and show the way to those dim of sight.
Integration of spirit--that is power, that is progress. Compared to
this, a mere education of the mind is vain and dull--a hoarding of
facts, as coins are hoarded; a gathering of vanities, as clothes and
adornments are gathered together. His soul cried out within him: Teach
the Spirit of God. "The soul who ascendeth to worship God is plain and
true."... Teach the Spirit, break daily new ground of giving and
devotion. Growth of Spirit--_that_ is blessedness! _That_ is the
exalted end of all suffering in the flesh. The world is good; all is
good. There is no evil, but the ignorant uses of self-consciousness.
Man has fallen into dark ways that belong to the awful ascent from the
dim innocence of animals to the lustrous knowledge of God.
Treasure every loving impulse; the number of these is your day's
achievement--thus the Voice went on. Love giving; let the throat
tighten with emotion for others, and the hand go out to the stranger;
love giving, but love more--him who receives. Preserve humility in your
blessedness. There is nothing to fear, no darkness of destiny, nothing
to fear for the growing and humble spirit. Death! It is but the
breaking of a rusty scabbard to loose a flashing blade!
"Oh, that I were a hundred men--to die before all men--to die daily!"
he cried out. "But I shall live. I shall live with the poor. I shall
feed them the bread of the body; and, if I may, the bread of life. I
shall be brother to the poor, and they shall hear of their kingdoms....
Oh, God, help me to utter the glory of life, the sublimity of the human
soul!"
And now he saw the terrible need of pity for those who wrap themselves
in the softest furs, who feed upon the breasts of doves and drink the
spirit of purple and golden grapes--those whom the world serves, and
who are so arrogant in their regality. He must not forecast the falling
of such, but pity them--and speak, if they would listen--for their need
is often greater than that of the menials who cringe before their empty
greatness, blinded by their kingly trappings. The world so often
betrays them at the end, strips them to nakedness and leaves them to
die--for they are the cripples, the sick, the blind in spirit....
Delicately he must attend the brutal and arrogant; not hate them, even
when he perceives their devastation among the poor. Everywhere to give
tokens of his health and power.
His love came back--as in lightning, his love came back! Not the love
of one that he had known--that was good, inevitable, even the restless
agony of it. Through the love of one, comes the love of many.... But
this was love of the world! It surged over, through him--like the fire
of the burning bush--that did not devour.... He had abstained from evil
before, but held the taste for certain evils. _Now the taste was
gone_--for every fleshly thing. Wanting nothing, he could love, indeed.
* * * * *
How strange and wonderful! All that he had thought before, and
expressed in New York, had seemed his very own--the realizations of
Andrew Bedient--but this night his every thought, almost, had a
parallel, from one or another of the great ones who had gone this high
way before.... He perceived that he had been old in self-consciousness,
so, that, in a way, his New York utterances were stamped with his own
individuality. In this greater consciousness he was a child; its glory
was beyond words. He could only echo the attempts of those whose lips
had faltered with ecstasy.
_If any man is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things are
passed away; behold, they are become new._
Such was Paul's clear saying.... The difference between Andrew Bedient
at this hour and the self he had been was great as that between the
simple consciousness of the ox and the self-consciousness of man.
This was the borderland of Gautama's Nirvana; this the Living Water,
Jesus offered to the woman at the well; this the Holy Ghost that
appeared unto the Hebrew saints and prophets--Moses, Gideon, Samuel,
Isaiah, Stephen; this the genius of Paul, the ecstasy of Plotinus, the
paradise of Behmen, the heavenly light of St. John of the Cross; this,
the Beatrice of Dante, the Gabriel of Mahomet, the Master Peter of
Roger Bacon, the Seraphita of Balzac, the radiant companion of Whitman,
and the _I_ of Edward Carpenter.
The light would have killed one who had not integrated spiritual light
to reflect it. The light of the Illuminati is terrible to eyes filled
with evil. This was the "smile of the Universe" that Dante saw.... He,
Andrew Bedient, loved infinitely and was infinitely loved. The words of
a hundred saints echoed in his consciousness--and out of them all came
this command:
_Make men to know that this which has come to you, will come to them.
The few have gone before you, but the many have not ascended so far._
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."