Children of the Palace, haste--
All who yearn the bliss to taste
Of the glorious Little-Faced,
Where, within the King's house placed,
Shines the sapphire throne enchased.
Come, in joyful dance enlaced,
Mock the cold and primly chaste.
See no sullen nor straitlaced
In our circle may be traced.
Here with th' Ancient One embraced
Inmost truth 'tis ours to taste,
Outer husks are shred to waste.
Children of the Palace, haste,
With the glory to be graced,
Come, behold the Little-Faced.
We broke up some hours earlier than the previous evening, but I hurried
away from my sauntering fellow-worshippers, not now because I was
disgusted, but because I feared to be. I needed solitude--communion
with my own soul. The same crescent moon hung in the heavens, the same
endless stars drew on the thoughts to a material infinity.
But now I felt there was another and a truer universe encompassing
this painted vision--a spiritual universe of which I had hitherto
known nothing, though I had glibly prated of it and listened
well-satisfied to sermons about it.
The air was warm and pleasant, and, still thrilling with the sense of
the Over-Soul, I had passed the outposts of the village almost
unconsciously, and walked in the direction of the cemetery on the
other slope of the mountain (for the dead feared neither floods nor
avalanches). On my left ran the river, still turbulent and encumbered
with wreckage and logs, but now at low tide some feet below the level
of its steep banks. The road gradually narrowed till at last I was
walking on a mere strip of path between the starlit water and the base
of the mountain, which rose ineffably solemn with its desolate rock at
my side and its dark pines higher up. And suddenly lifting my eyes, I
saw before me a mystic moonlit figure that set my heart beating with
terror and surprise.
It was the figure of a woman, or rather of a girl, tall, queenly,
shining in a strange white robe, with a crown of roses and olive
branches. For a moment she seemed like some spirit of moonlight. But
though the eyes were misted with sadness and dream, the face was of
the most beautiful Jewish oval, glowing with dark creamy flesh.
A wild idea rose to my mind, and, absurdly enough, stilled my beating
heart. This was the Holy Queen Sabbath whose departure we had just
been celebrating, and in this unfrequented haunt she abode till the
twilight of the next Friday.
"Hail, Holy Queen!" I said, almost involuntarily.
I saw her large beautiful eyes grow larger as she woke with a start to
my presence, but she only inclined her head with a sovereign air, as
one used to adoration, and floated on--for so her gracious motion
seemed to me.
And as she passed by, it flashed upon me that the strange white robe
was nothing but a shroud. And again a great horror seized me. But
struggling with my failing senses, I told myself that at worst it was
some poor creature buried alive in the graveyard, who had forced the
coffin lid, and now wandered half insanely homewards.
"May I not escort you, lady?" I cried after her. "The way is lonely."
She turned her face again upon me. I saw it had fire as well as
mystery.
"Who dare molest the Holy Queen?" she said.
Again I was plunged into the wildest bewilderment. Was my first fancy
true? Or had I stumbled upon some esoteric title she bore? Or had she
but seized on my own phrase?
"But you go far?" I persisted.
"Unto my father's house."
"Pardon me. I am a stranger."
She turned round wholly now and looked at me. "Oh, are _you_ the
_Stranger_?" she said. The question rippled like music from her lips
and was as sweet to my ear, linking her to me by the suggestion that I
was not new to her imagination.
"I am the Stranger," I answered, moving slowly toward her, "and
therefore afraid for your sake, and startled by the shroud you wear."
"Since the dawn of my thirteenth year it has been my daily robe. It
should be in lamentation for Zion laid waste. But me, I fear, it
reminds more of my dead mother and sisters."
"You had sisters?"
"Two beautiful lives, blown out one after the other like candles,
making our home dark, when I was but a child. They too wore shrouds in
life and death, first the elder, then the younger; and when I draw
mine over my dress, it is of them I think always. I feel we are truly
sisters--sisters of the shroud."
I shivered as from some chill graveyard air, despite her sweet
corporeality.
"But the crown--the crown of joy?" I murmured, regarding now with
closer vision the intertangled weaving of roses and myrtle and olive
branches, with gold and crimson threads wound about salt stones and
the pale yellow of pyrites.
"I do not know what it signifies," she said simply.
"Are you not the Holy Queen?" I asked, beginning to scent some
Cabalistic or _Chassidic_ mystery.
"Men worship me. But I know not of what I am queen." And a wistful
smile played about the sweet mouth. "Peace and sweet dreams to you,
sir." And she turned her face to the village.
She knew not of what she was queen. There, all in one sentence, was
the charm, the wonder, the pathos, of her. Yet there was still much
that she knew that would enlighten me. And it was not wholly curiosity
that provoked me to hold the vision. I hated to see the enchantment of
her presence dissolve, to be robbed of the liquid notes of her voice.
"You are queen of me at least," I said, following her, and throwing
all my republican principles into the river among the other wreckage.
"And your Majesty's liege cannot endure to see you walk unattended so
late in the night."
"I have God's company," she answered quietly.
"True; He is always with us. Nevertheless, at night and in the
mountains--"
"He may be perceived more clearly. My father makes soul-ascensions at
any hour by force of prayer. But for me the divine ecstasy comes only
under God's heaven, and most clearly at night and among the graves.
By day God is invisible, like the stars."
"They may be perceived from a well," I said, mechanically, for my
brain was busy with the intuition that she was Ben David's daughter,
that her "queendom" was somehow bound up with his alleged royal
descent.
"Even so is God visible from the deeps of the spirit," she answered.
"But these depths are not mine, and day speaks to me less surely of
Him."
"The day is divine too," I urged. "God speaks also through joy,
through sunshine."
"It is but the gilding of sorrow."
"Nay, that is too hard a saying. How can you know that? You"--I made a
bold guess, for my brain had continued to work feverishly--"who live
cloistered in a turret, who are kept sequestered from man, who walk at
night, and only among the dead. How can you know that life is so sad?"
"I feel it. Is not every stone in the graveyard hewn from the dead
heart of the mourners?"
All the sadness of the world was in her eyes, yet somehow all the
sweet solace. Again she bade me good-night, and I was so under the
spell of her strange reply that I made no further effort to follow
her, as she was swallowed up in the gloom of the firs where the path
wound back round the mountain.