I descended into the valley; the armed men followed. The path, on that
side of the watercourse 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-coloured
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 towards me, cringing and fawning, making signs of humble
good-will 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
practised physician, and the magical arts of the fated Enchanter! I had
fled from the commonplace teachings of Nature, to explore in her
Shadow-land marvels at variance with reason. Made brave by the grandeur
of love, I had opposed without quailing the stride of the Demon, and by
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 skilless, 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. Alan 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 towards 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 illumined 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 splendours 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 colour 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 clear arms closed around me in wife-like 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.
THE END.