"Besides, you came to me from the other side!" said she glancing in
his face.
"Did you see me there?" Balder was on the point of asking; but he was
wise enough to refrain. If he could believe it true, let him not tempt
his happiness; if faith were weak, why build a barrier against it? So
he kept silence.
"You found my violets!" whispered Gnulemah, with a shy smile. "You
understand all I do and am; it is happiness to be with you."
They sat down by mutual consent beneath a crooked old apple-tree,
which yet blossomed as pure and fresh as did the youngest in the
orchard. From beneath this white and perfumed tent was a view of the
distant city.
Gnulemah could not be called talkative, yet in giving her thoughts
expression she outdid vocabularies. Many fine muscles there were
around her eyes, at the corners of her mouth, and especially in the
upper lip,--whose subtile curvings and contractions spoke volumes of
question, appeal, observation. Her form by its endless shiftings
uttered delicate phrases of pleasure, surprise, or love; her hands and
fingers were orators, and eloquent were the curlings and tappings of
her Arab feet.
This kind of language would be blank to one used rather to hear words
than to feel them; but Balder, in, his present exalted mood, delighted
in it. Was there any enjoyment more refined than to see his thought,
before he had given it breath, lighten in the eyes of this daughter
of fire? and with his own eyes to catch the first pure glimmer of her
yet unborn fancies? A language genial of intimacy, for the talkers
must feel in order to utterance,--must meet each other, from the heart
outward, at every point. The human form is made of meanings. It is the
full thought of its Creator, comprising all other thoughts. Is it
blind chance or lifeless expediency that moulds the curves of woman's
bosom, builds up man's forehead like a citadel, and sets his head on
his shoulders? Is beauty beautiful, or are we cozened by congenial
ugliness? But Balder's philosophic scepticism should never have braved
a test like Gnulemah!
Except music, painting, sculpture,--all the arts and inspiration of
them,--waited on the nib of the pen, such talk as passed between these
two could not be written. Some things--and those not the least
profound and admirable of life--transcend the cunning of man to
interpret them, unless to an apprehension as fine as they! We are fain
to content ourselves with the husks.
"It must be happy there!" said Gnulemah, looking cityward. "So many
Balders and Gnulemahs!"
"Why happy?" asked the man of the world, with a faint smile.
"We are only two, and have known each other to-day and yesterday. But
they, you said, are as many as the stars, and have been together many
yesterdays."
Such was the woman's unclinched argument, leaving her listener to draw
the inference. He would not forestall her enlightenment from the grim
page of his own experience. But do not many pure and loving souls pass
through the world without once noticing how bad most of the roads are,
and how vexed the climates? So might not the earthly heaven of
Gnulemah's imagination tenderly blind her to the unheavenly earth of
Balder's knowledge?
Through his abstraction Balder felt on his hand a touch soft as the
flowing of a breath, yet pregnant of indefinite apprehension. When two
clouds meet, there is a hush and calm; but the first seeming-trifling
lightning-flash brings on the storm whereby earth's face is altered.
So Balder, full-charged as the thunder-cloud, awaited fearfully the
first vivid word which should light the way for those he had resolved
to speak.
"I see you with my open eyes, Balder, and touch you and hear you. Is
this the end I thought would come? Balder, are you greatest?" With
full trust she appealed to him to testify concerning himself. This was
the seriousness he had marked beneath the smile.
"Are you content it should be so?"
She plucked a blade of grass and tied it in a knot, and began,
drawing a trembling breath between each few words,--
"O Balder,--if I must kneel to you as to the last and greatest of
all,--if there is nothing too holy to be seen and touched,--if there
is no Presence too sublime for me to comprehend--"
"What then?" asked he, meeting her troubled look with a strong,
cheerful glance.
"Then the world is less beautiful than I thought it; the sun is less
bright, and I am no more pleasing to myself." Tears began to flow down
her noble cheeks; but Balder's eyes grew brighter, seeing which,
Gnulemah was encouraged to continue.
"How could I be happy? for either must I draw myself apart from you--O
Balder!--or else live as your equal, and so degrade you; for I am not
a goddess!"
"Then there are no goddesses on earth, nor gods! Gnulemah, you need
not shrink from me for that."
The beautiful woman smiled through her sparkling eyelashes. She could
love and reverence the man who, as a deity, bewildered and
disappointed her. But was the intuition therefore false which had
revealed to her the grand conception of a supreme, eternal God?
They sat silent for a while, and neither looked in the other's face.
They had struck a sacred chord, and the sweet, powerful sound thrilled
Balder no less than Gnulemah. But presently he looked up; his cheeks
warmed, and his heart swelled out. He was about to put in jeopardy his
most immediate jewel, and the very greatness of the risk gave him
courage. Not to the world, that could not judge him righteously, would
he confess his crime,--but to the woman he loved and who loved him.
Her verdict could not fail to be just and true.
Could a woman's judgment of her lover be impartial? Yes, if her
instincts be pure and harmonious, and her worldly knowledge that of a
child. Her discrimination between right and wrong would be at once
accurate and involuntary, like the test of poison. Love for the
criminal would but sharpen her intuition. The sentence would not be
spoken, but would be readable in eyes untainted alike by prejudice or
sophistry.
Gnulemah was thus made the touchstone of Balder's morality. He stood
ready to abide by her decision. Her understanding of the case should
first be made full; then, if condemned by her look, he would publish
his crime to the world, and suffer its penalty. But should her eyes
absolve him, then was crime an illusion, evil but undeveloped good,
the stain of blood a prejudice, and Cain no outcast, but the venerable
forefather of true freedom.
Unsearchable is the heart of man. Balder had looked forward to
condemnation with a wholesome solemnity which cheered while it
chastened him. But the thought of acquittal, and at Gnulemah's hands,
appalled him. The implicit consequences to humanity seemed more
formidable than the worst which condemnation could bring upon himself.
So much had he lately changed his point of view, that only the fear of
seeing his former creed confirmed could have now availed to stifle his
confession.
But that fear did not much disquiet him; he trusted too deeply in his
judge to believe that she would justify it. In short, Gnulemah was in
his opinion right-minded, exactly in proportion as she should convict
him of being in the wrong. Balder resigned the helm of his vessel,
laden as she was with the fruits of years of thought and speculation,
at the critical moment of her voyage,--resigned her to the guidance of
a woman's unreasoning intuition. He might almost as well have averred
that the highest reach of intellect is to a perception of the better
worth and wisdom of an unlearned heart.
XXIII.
BALDER TELLS AN UNTRUTH.
By way of enheartening himself for what he was to do, Balder kissed
the posy of Gnulemah's fragrant footsteps. He kept his eyes down, lest
she should see something in them to distract her attention from his
story. He must go artfully to work,--gain her assent to the abstract
principles before marshalling them against himself.
Meanwhile Gnulemah had picked up a gold beetle, and was examining it
with a certain grave interest.
"I never told you how I came by this ring of Hiero's. It was the night
before I first saw you, Gnulemah."
"The ring guided you to me!" said she, glancing at his downcast
visage.
"Perhaps it did!" he muttered, struck by the ingenious superstition;
and he eyed the keen diamond half suspiciously. How fiercely the
little serpents were struggling for it! "But Hiero--he has lost it,
and you will see him no more!"
"You are with me!" returns she, shining out at him from beneath her
level brows. What should she know of death and parting?
Balder still forbore to raise his face. Gnulemah was in a frolicsome
humor, the reaction of her foregoing solemnity. But Balder, who deemed
this hour the gravest of his life, was taken aback by her unseasonable
gayety. Casting about for means to sober her,--an ungracious thing for
a lover to do!--he hit upon the gold beetle.
"Dead; the poor little beetle! Do you know what death is, Gnulemah?"
"It is what makes life. The sun dies every night, to get life for the
morning. And trees die when cold comes, so as to smile out in green
leaves again,--greener than if there had been no death. So it is with
all things."
"Not with everything," said Balder, taking her light-heartedness very
gravely. "That gold beetle in your hand is dead, and will never live
or move again."
But at that Gnulemah smiled; and bringing her hand, with the beetle in
it, near her perfect lips, she lent it a full warm breath,--enough to
have enlivened an Egyptian scarabæus,--and behold! the beetle spread
its wings and whizzed away. Before Balder could recover from this
unexpected refutation, the lovely witch followed up her advantage.
"You thought, perhaps, that Hiero was as dead as the little beetle;
but he lives more beautifully in you!"
He looked startled up, his large eyes glittering blackly in the
paleness of his face. Gnulemah, with the serenity of a victorious
disputant willing to make allowances, continued,--
"It may be different in the outside world from which you come; but
here death ends nothing, but makes life new and strong."
After a silence of some duration, poor Balder renewed his attack from
another quarter.
"What would you think of one who put to death a creature you loved?"
She smiled, and shook her glowing pendants.
"Only God puts to death; and no one would hurt a thing I love!"
"What should you think of one who put to death a man?"
Gnulemah looked for a moment perplexed and indignant. Then, to
Balder's great discomfiture, she laughed like a bird-chorus.
"Why do you imagine what cannot be? Would you and Hiero kill each
other? The gray owl kills little mice, but that is to eat them. Would
you eat Hiero--"
"Don't laugh, Gnulemah!" besought he. "I should kill him, not as
animals kill one another, but from rage and hatred."
"Hatred!" repeated Gnulemah, dislikingly; "hatred,--what is it?"
"A passion of men's hearts,--the wish that evil may befall others.
When the hatred is bitter enough, and the opportunity fair, they
kill!"
Gnulemah shuddered slightly and looked sad. Then she leaned towards
Balder and touched his shoulder persuasively.
"Never think of such things, or talk of them! Could you hate anyone,
Balder? or kill him if you did?"
With that glorious presence so near him,--her voice so close to his
ear,--how could he answer her? His heart awoke, and beat and drove the
tingling blood tumultuously forth to the remotest veins. She saw the
flush, and caught the passionate brilliancy of his eyes. Happy and
afraid, she drew back, saying in haste,--
"You have not told me yet about the ring!"
That was not wisely said! Balder checked himself with a sudden, strong
hand, and held still,--his brows lowered down and his lips settled
together,--until his pulses were quiet and his cheeks once more pale.
"I will tell you," he said; "but to understand, you must first hear
some other things." He hesitated, face to face with an analysis of
murder. The position was at once stimulating and appalling. To dissect
and reduce to its elements that grisly murder-devil which had once
possessed his own soul, and whose writhings beneath the scalpel he
would therefore feel as his own--here loomed a prospect large and
terrible! Nevertheless, Balder took up the knife.
The white petal of an apple-blossom, part from its calyx, came
floating earthwards; but a breeze caught it and wafted it aloft. It
sank again, and was again arrested and borne skywards. Finally is
disappeared over the cliff-edge.
"The weight that made it fall is of the earth," said Balder (both he
and Gnulemah had been watching the petal's course). "The breeze that
buoyed it up was from heaven, and so it is with man. Were there no
heavenly support, he would fall at once, but whether or not, he always
tends to fall."
Gnulemah objected, "It loves the air better than the earth!"
"When man begins to fall, he becomes mad, and thinks he is not
falling, but that earth is heaven, to which he is rising. But since
earth is not like heaven, infinite, he does not wish others to enjoy
it, lest his own pleasure be marred."
"How can that be?" said the unwilling Gnulemah. "What can make men so
happy on earth as other men?"
"Each wants all power for himself," rejoined Balder, his voice growing
stern as he pursued his theme. "They want to hurl their fellows out of
the world, even to annihilation. Every moment this hatred is let grow
in the heart's garden, it spreads and strengthens, till it gains
dominion and makes men slaves, and madder than before. Each will be
above his rival,--his enemy! he will be absolute master over him. And
from that resolve is born murder!"
"Why do you tell Gnulemah this?" she asked, lifting her head like a
majestic serpent. But she could not stop him now. His voice, measured
at first, was now driven by emotion.
"Murder comes next; and many a man, had fear or impotence not withheld
him, would have done murder a thousand times. But sometimes the demon
leaps up and masters impotence and fear. The man is drunk with
immeasurable selfishness,--greater than the universe can satisfy;
which would fain make one victim after another, till all the human
race should be destroyed; and then would it turn against Heaven and
God. Save for man's mortal frailty, the population of the world would
ever and anon be swept away by some giant murderer.
"Wickedness grows faster, the wickeder it is; he who has been wicked
once will easily be so again,--the more easily as his crime was great.
Even though through all his mortal life he sin no more, yet his drift
is thitherward! Only the air of Heaven breathing through his soul
after death can make him pure."
Balder was speaking out all the gloom and terror which had been
silently gathering within him since his fatal night. As he spoke, his
mind expanded, and perceived things before unknown. As the reasons for
condemnation multiplied, he did but push on the harder, striking at
each tender spot in his own armor. And as the day turned fatally
against him, his face looked great and heroic, and his voice sounded
almost triumphant.
Thus far, he had only generalized; now, he was come to his own plight.
On several points he had been painfully in doubt: whether he had done
the deed in self-defence; whether he had meant to do it; whether it
had not been a blind, mad accident, since swollen by fevered
imagination into the likeness of wilful crime. But against such doubts
arrayed itself the ineffaceable memory of that wild joy which had
filled his soul, when he had felt his enemy in his power! Had the man
survived, Balder might still have doubted; being dead, doubts were but
cowardly sophistry.
But during the brief pause he made, came a backward recoil of that
impulse which had swept him on. All at once he was cold, and wavered.
Gnulemah was sitting with her elbow on her knee, her strange eyes
fixed upon him. Had he duly considered what effect all this might have
on her? In aiming at his own life, might not the sword pass also
through hers? Abruptly to behold sin,--to find in the first man she
had learnt to know, the sinner,--to be left this burden on her untried
soul,--might this not ruin more than her earthly happiness? Did she
still love him, such love could end only in misery; should she hate
him who of all men was bound to protect her defencelessness,--that
were misery indeed!
This misgiving, arresting his hand at the instant of delivering the
final blow, almost discouraged the much-tried man. He glanced sullenly
toward the edge of the cliff, only a few yards off. A new thought
jarred through his nerves! He got up and walked to the brink. Full
sixty feet to the bottom.
Gnulemah also rose slowly, and stretched herself like a tired child,
sending a lazy tension through every noble limb and polished muscle.
She sighed with a deep breathing in and out, and pressed her hands
against her temples.
"I was not made to understand such things. Tell me of what you have
done or seen--I shall understand that. The things my love does not
enter only trouble me and make me sad."
As she spoke, she turned away towards the house. She saw, or thought
she saw, a man's figure stealing cautiously behind a clump of bushes
near the north-eastern corner. Her listlessness fell from, her like a
mantle, and she watched, motionless!
Her last words had goaded Balder past bearing. As she turned away, his
face looked grim and forlorn. He balanced with half-raised arms on the
cliff's brink. The river slumbered bluely on below, peace was aloft in
the sky, and joy in the trees and grass. But in the man were darkness
and despair and loathing of his God-given life!
The thing he meditated was not to be, however. Close in shore a little
boat glided into view, beating up against stream. In the stern, the
sheet in one hand and the tiller in the other, sat Balder's old friend
Charon. He nodded up at the young man with a recognizing grin. Then he
laid his tiller-hand aside his brown cheek and sang out,--
"Look out there, Capt'n! Davy Jones's got back,--run foul of you!"
The next moment he put down the helm and ran out.
Meantime Balder, coloring from shame, had stepped back from his
dangerous position; and the peril was past. But the paltering
irresolution which he had at all points displayed urged him to redeem
himself,--else was he lower than a criminal. He went towards
Gnulemah,--knelt down,--caught her dress,--he knew not what he did! In
a blind dance of sentences he told her that he was a murderer, that
all he had said pointed at himself, that with his own hands he had
killed Hiero, whose body now lay at the bottom of the sea; many
frantic words he spoke. Thus, without art or rhetoric, roughly dragged
forth by head and ears, came his momentous confession into the world.
Gnulemah had more than once striven to check it, but in vain. When he
had come to an end, and stood tense and quivering as a bowstring whose
arrow has just flown, these words reached him:--
"Hiero is not dead; he is there behind the trees."
Stiffly he turned and stared bewildered. Landscape, sky, Gnulemah,
swam before his eyes in fragments, like images in troubled water. She
put out her arm and tenderly supported him.
"Where?" said he at length.
"Near the house,--there!" she pointed.
Balder began to walk forward doubtfully. But, suddenly realizing what
lay before him, clearness and vigor ebbed back. He saw a figure turn
the corner of the house. Then he leapt out and ran like a stag-hound!
XXIV.
UNCLE HIERO AT LAST.
In a couple of minutes Balder was at the house, breathless: the figure
was nowhere to be seen. He sprang across the broad portico, and
hurried with sounding feet through the oaken hall. Should he go up
stairs, or on to the conservatory? The sound of a softly shutting door
from the latter direction decided him. The place looked as when he
left it a half-hour before. Gnulemah's curtain had not been moved. The
other door was closed; he ran up the steps between the granite
sphinxes, and found it locked. Butting his shoulder against the panel
with impatient force, the hinges broke from their rotten fastenings,
and the door gave inwards. Balder stepped past it, and found himself
in the sombre lamp-lit interior of the temple.
He could discern but little; the place seemed vast; the corners were
veiled in profound shadow. At the farther end a huge lamp was
suspended, by a chain from the roof, over a triangular altar of black
marble. The architecture of the room was strange and massive as of
Egyptian temples. Strong, dark colors met the eye on all sides; in the
panels of the walls and distant ceiling fantastic devices showed
obscurely forth. Nine mighty columns, of design like those in the
doorway, were ranged along the walls, their capitals buried in the
upward gloom.
Becoming used to the dusk, Balder now marked an array of colossal
upright forms, alternating between the pillars. Their rough
resemblance to human figures drew him towards one of them: it was an
Egyptian sarcophagus covered with hieroglyphic inscriptions, and
probably holding an immemorial mass of spiced flesh and rags. These
silent relics of a prehistoric past seemed to be the only company
present. In view of his uncle's well-known tastes, the nephew was not
unprepared to meet these gentry.
But he was come to seek the living, not the dead. The figure that he
had seen outside must be within these four walls, there being no other
visible outlet besides the door through which Balder had entered. Was
old Hiero Glyphic lurking in one of these darksome corners, or behind
some thick-set column? The young man looked about him as sharply as he
could, but nothing moved except the shadows thrown by the lamp, which
was vibrating pendulum-like on its long chain.
He approached this lamp, his steps echoing on the floor of polished
granite. What had set the thing swinging? It had a leisurely
elliptical motion, as from a moderate push sideways. The lamp was
wrought in bronze, antique of fashion and ornament. It had capacity
for gallons of oil, and would burn for weeks without refilling. The
altar beneath was a plain black marble prism, highly polished, resting
upon a round base of alabaster. A handful of ashes crowned its top.
Between the altar and the wall intervened a space of about seven feet.
The glare of the lamp had blinded Balder to what was beyond it; but,
on stepping round it, he was confronted by an old-fashioned upright
clock, such as were in vogue upon staircase-landings and in
entrance-halls a hundred years ago. With its broad, white, dial-plate,
high shoulders, and dark mahogany case, it looked not unlike a tall,
flat-featured man, holding himself stiffly erect. But whether man or
clock, it was lifeless; the hands were motionless,--there was no sound
of human or mechanical heart-beat within though Balder held his yet
panting breath to listen. Was it Time's coffin, wherein his corpse had
lain still many a silent year,--only that years must stand still
without Time to drive them on! But this still had had no part in the
moving world,--knew naught of life and change, day and night. Here
dwelt a moveless present,--a present at once past and to come, yet
never here! No wonder the mummies felt at home! though even they could
only partially appreciate the situation.
The clock was fastened against the wall. The longer Balder gazed at
it, the more human-like did it appear. Its face was ornamented with
colored pictures of astronomical processes, sufficiently resembling a
set of shadowy features, of a depressed and insignificant type. The
mahogany case served for a close-fitting brown surtout, buttoned to
the chin. The slow vibration of the lamp produced on the countenance
the similitude of a periodically recurring grimace.
Not only did the clock look human, but--or so Balder fancied--it bore
a grotesque and extravagant likeness to a certain elderly relative of
his, whose portrait he had carried in an inner pocket of his
haversack,--now in Long Island Sound. It reminded him, in a word, of
poor old Uncle Hiero, whom he had--no, no!--who was alive and well,
and was perhaps even now observing his dear nephew's perplexity, and
maliciously chuckling over it!