Iona went away with a stately step, but with a brain on fire. It was
only when near the Arcade that she quickened her steps; and when inside
the door, she ran upstairs.
Having found Elena, “I am going out to the Olives for a few days,” she
said, “and I want to start at once for the Pines. Will you have Isadore
called to go with me? I will meet him at the water-gate.”
She waited for no reply, but hastened to her own room. In a few minutes
she came out dressed in the gray costume of labor.
“Everything is ready,” Elena said, meeting her, and expressed neither
surprise nor curiosity.
The sun had set, and it was night when Iona met the men who had been
sent up to attend her. But she would suffer them to go no farther than
the water-gate.
“I know the road well,” she said, “and am in no danger. When at daylight
you see the signal that I am at the Pines, you will turn the gate again.
It will be sooner done if you stay here.”
They obeyed unwillingly, and she went over the wild mountain road alone,
guiding her donkey with a careful hand, and conscious only of a dull
discomfort. It was midnight when she reached the Pines.
“Don’t be alarmed!” she said cheerfully to the guardian. “I am sorry to
disturb you; but I wish to go to the Olives. Go to bed now, and be ready
at six in the morning to accompany me.”
The man said no more. They questioned Iona as little as they did Dylar.
They were in the lower room. Iona went to the chamber above; but when
she heard the upper door close, she came down again, unbarred the
outside door, and went out into the Pines. Space was what she
wanted,—space and solitude.
It was a sultry night, and the still air under the pines was heavily
perfumed, not only with their branches, but with the oppressive
sweetness of little flowering vines that ran about through the moss
underneath them. A mist that was mingled of moisture and fragrance hung
in the tree-tops, and above them, dimming the stars. It was stupefying.
Iona felt her way, step by step, over the slippery ground, and leaned
against one of the great pine-boles, scarcely knowing where she was.
There was left in her mind only a vague sense of ruin and a vague
impulse to escape. She stood there and stared into the darkness till she
was faint and weary, then sank down where she stood and sat on the
ground. There was an absolute stillness all about her. The only motion
perceptible was in the narrow strip of sky between the tree-tops and the
rock, where one dim hieroglyph of stars slowly gave place to another.
Once from some bird’s-nest not far away came a small complaining note.
Perhaps a wing, or beak, or claw, of some little sleeper had disturbed
its downy neighbor. Then all was still again. But the little plaintive
bird-note touched the listener’s memory as well as her ear. The
atmosphere of her mind was as heavy as that around her body, and the
suggestion was dim. She had almost let it slip when it came of itself, a
Turkish proverb: “The nest of the blind bird God builds.”
It was the first whisper of Divine help that had risen in her soul.
Perhaps then it was an angel’s wing that had disturbed the bird in its
sleep.
Iona glanced upward and saw the pale mists beginning to quicken with the
coming day. “God help me!” she murmured listlessly, and rising, went
into the house and to her chamber.
The early training of San Salvador was expressly calculated to give the
child a few indelible impressions. One of these was to do no desperate
nor extraordinary act without first taking counsel from some
disinterested person, or taking a certain time “to see if the King would
interpose.” In absenting herself for a while from San Salvador, Iona had
obeyed the sudden command of necessity. But that step taken, her
instinct was to do all as silently and calmly as possible.
“I will not mention Tacita Mora’s name, and I will work,” she thought.
It was the one step in advance which she could see.
Shortly after sunrise she started for the Olives. Reaching the turn of
the road where the green began, she descended from her donkey to walk to
the castle, and the man went on to make the necessary gossip concerning
her arrival. For some reason the first step on the greensward under
those gray-green branches awakened her sleeping passion. Was it grief
that the peacefulness of the scene knocked in vain at her heart for
entrance? She would willingly have thrown herself down in those quiet
shadows and wept. The strong check she drew on the impulse brought up
its contrary, and she laughed lightly.
There was no one in the great circular ground-room of the tower, nor on
the grand stairs where a man might ride up and down on horseback; but
reaching the top, she was met by the housekeeper.
“Take my arm,” the woman said. “You must be very tired. I saw you from
the window,” and she gave no intimation of surprise nor curiosity.
“I am tired and hungry and sleepy,” Iona said smilingly, availing
herself of the offered support. “I find that I have not had exercise
enough, and am too quickly fatigued. That is so easy with what I have to
do. But I have come out here to work. If you will bring me a cup of
chocolate, I will then try to sleep. I reached the Pines very late last
night.”
She went to the chamber that was called hers, drank the chocolate that
was brought her, and, overcome by fatigue, fell asleep.
“Prince Dylar has sent you the keys,” the housekeeper said to her when
she woke. “He said that you forgot them. The messenger is waiting to
know if there is any word to take back.”
“None except to thank the prince for taking so much trouble,” Iona said.
If she were more irritated or soothed by Dylar’s evident anxiety it
would not have been easy to say. The sending of the keys, too, besides
giving an opportunity to learn if she were well, was a reminder of his
confidence in her and of her importance to San Salvador. They were the
keys of his private apartment, the treasure-vault, and of the door
leading to the ravine where a stream of water still brought an
occasional grain of gold.
She opened the case with a little key of her own, and looked eagerly to
see if there were any written word, snatching out the slip of paper that
she found.
She read: “I think that the late rains may have washed out a few
grains of gold. I did not go when I was last at the castle. Will you
look?
DYLAR.”
Just as if nothing had happened! Iona put her hand to her forehead and
for a moment wondered if anything had happened.
“I must work hard!” she thought. “‘When nature is in revolt, put her
into the treadmill;’” and she went out to see what there was to do,
going from house to house, greeting the people and welcomed by them.
They supposed that she had just arrived from some distant city, but
asked no questions, knowing that she was one of Dylar’s messengers.
There was a field of wheat ripened, and Iona put on a broad-brimmed hat
and thick gloves, and taking a sickle, went out to it across the
vineyards. “I am to do it all,” she said laughingly. “Let no one come
near me.”
Had any one in San Salvador seen her speaking to those people, he would
have thought that he had never seen her so gay; and had he seen her
when, leaving all behind, she went out alone, he would have wondered at
the gloomy passion of her face.
She put her sickle into the grain, and bent to her work like any
habitual laborer. In fact, she had done the same work before in play.
Handful by handful, the golden glistening stalks fell in a straight
ridge across the field; and as the movement grew mechanical, her
thoughts took, as it were, a sickle, and began to reap in another field.
With a savage strength it cut through the years of her life, all its
golden promise and fulfillment, all its holy aspirations, all its
towering visionary building which had been, indeed, but a dream of
empire and of love. It cut through the humbler growth of sweetness
blooming like the little blue flowers she severed from their roots and
cast aside to wither, or trampled under her feet. As she wrought thus,
sternly, with a double blade, the mental harvest even more real to her
mind than this one that the June sun shone upon, her breath kept time
with a sharp hiss to the hiss of the sickle, and her heart bled.
With no cessation from her labor except to wipe the perspiration from
her face, she reaped till sunset. Then, after standing a little while in
doubt what next to do, she bent again, and reaped till the stars came
out. Their lambent shining through the falling dew lighted her back to
the castle. The windows were all open in the houses as she passed them,
and some of the people were seated at supper in their great basement
rooms, as large as churches, with their rows of arches, instead of
walls, supporting the ceiling.
“Let no one touch my work,” Iona called gayly in at one of the windows,
“unless you should wish to bring in what I have reaped. I have put a
cornice around the field. I would have reaped all night if there were a
moon. Good-night. Peace be with you.”
They echoed her salutation; and she hung her sickle on the outer wall,
and took her way to the castle.
“Don’t tell me that you have had your supper!” the housekeeper said;
“for I have taken such pleasure in preparing one for you.”
“I shall eat it, for I have earned it,” Iona replied, taking off her
coarse gloves and straightening out her cramped fingers.
But what she ate she knew not, nor what good fairy suggested to her
questions and answers and remarks that were to her as dry as husks, yet
which served as a screen to her misery. She seemed to have a secondary
mind which worked mechanically.
There are certain proverbial sayings which have an air of such owl-like
wisdom and are such a saving of mental work to those who repeat them
that they seem immortal. One of these is that no person is fit to
command who cannot obey. If it were said that no person is fit to
command an inferior who cannot obey a superior, a reasonable idea would
be conveyed.
Setting aside such cases as the apprenticeship of Apollo to a swineherd,
and the voluntary self-humiliation of an ascetic who seeks to win heaven
by effacing himself on earth, there is no more murderous injustice than
the enforced subjection of a lofty nature to a lower one. It is not a
question of pride, nor of fitness; it is a question of individual
existence.
Iona had been like a queen in San Salvador; and she had been a wise and
gentle sovereign. She had assumed no authority, and fully acknowledged
that she had none. She was always consulted, and she had made no
mistakes. Her whole strength had been expended to make herself worthy of
this preëminence, and she had succeeded. Her powers had risen with the
need of them, and she stood upright, sustained by this pressure from all
sides.
The pressure removed, for to her mind it was almost removed and would be
totally so, she collapsed and fell into confusion. With Tacita the wife
of Dylar, she took for granted that her reign in San Salvador was at an
end. For it was her power in the community, she persistently told
herself, not her power over the heart of Dylar, which she lamented. “It
is not love! I do not love him!” she had repeated a hundred times.
To her mind, Tacita, however sweet and lovely, was a girl of limited
capacity, but also one who could assume a dignified and even haughty
reserve when her relations with Dylar were called into question. As his
wife, she might object to any other female authority in the place; and
Iona well knew that the fair-haired girl, with her charming grace and
caressing manners, would win a greater affection from the people than
she herself would be able to win by the devotion of a life.
She went to her chamber with the hope of sleeping; but sleep was
impossible. She rose, took her lamp, and went downstairs, meeting the
housekeeper on the way.
“I am going out through the cellar,” she said. “Give me a long roll of
wax taper, and the key of the cellar door. I will take care of all.”
She tied the great roll of taper to her girdle, took a little wallet and
a lamp, and went down to the cellar. But instead of descending the
second stair, she went along under the damp arches, past the rows of
moist hogsheads, to a little stair that went up to a walled-up door. The
stairs had been utilized as shelves, and rows of jars and little bottles
of olives were set along them.
Iona cleared them all away from the four lower steps, and with a deft
hand took out two or three screws from the boards; then, turning back
the three lower stairs like a door, disclosed a steep stair underneath
through a square opening. The stair ended in a corridor from which was
heard the sound of waters, growing clearer as the passage led into a
cave that had a high opening at one side, like a round window, almost
lost in a long, close passage that looked as if broken in the rock by an
earthquake, louder again when a door was unlocked and opened into a
roofless passage of which one side diminished in height and showed a
fringe of little plants and mosses, and the other soared, a precipice.
Here was a little hollow through which flowed a brook coming through
crevices northward to disappear southward into crevices. Where it issued
from the rock in a fall of a few feet were two troughs, side by side,
turning on a hinge, so that the water might be made to pass through
either. Both were lined with nets that could be raised and drained.
Iona set her lamp on the rock, changed the troughs, and carefully raised
the net in the one through which the water had been passing, and with a
little wire spade turned over the débris left there. Where a yellow
glimmer showed, she picked it out and put it into the wallet hanging at
her side.
The night was so still that the flame of the lamp scarcely wavered; but
she swung her coil of lighted taper to and fro, and round in a circle,
to catch any glimmer of the precious metal hidden there.
There was neither tree nor shrub in sight. Grotesque peaks and cliffs
rose on every side, shutting her in. Scintillating overhead was the
Milky Way, a white torrent of stars from the heights of heaven flowing
between the black rock-rims that it seemed almost to touch.
The gold came in glimmer after glimmer, some almost too small to gather
out of the slippery débris, others half as large as the flame of the
lamp, and brightly glowing.
Iona’s spirit revived a little. The place, the time, and the occupation
took her out of the track of her habitual life. She recollected her
first visit to this place, when she and Dylar were children. They came
with his father. The prince had brought her after her father’s death,
hoping to distract her; and while she and the boy picked out the shining
grains, he sat on a lichened rock beside them, and told how men had
spent their lives in searching for and compounding the philosopher’s
stone in order to make at will this bright king of metals which they
were gathering from the sand.
He told how kings and queens had lavished patronage and treasure on such
seekers after hidden knowledge, and the names by which the magic stone
was called: _The daughter of the great secret; The sun and his father;
The moon and her mother_. He told them the legend that St. John, the
Evangelist, could make gold; and young Dylar paused in his search to
learn the verses of an old hymn to the saint that the alchemists applied
to themselves:—
“Inexhaustum fert thesaurum
Qui de virgis faeit aurum,
Gemmas de lapidibus.”
He described to them the _dry way_ and the _humid way_, the _white
powder_, that changed metals to fine silver, the _red elixir_, which
made gold and healed all sorts of wounds, the _white elixir_, _white
daughter of the philosophers_, which made silver and prolonged life
indefinitely. He told them the prediction of a German philosopher that
in the nineteenth century gold would be produced by galvanism, and
become so common that kitchen utensils would be made of it. “But that,”
the prince added, “will surely be a gift of wrath, and will come like a
thunderbolt. Men will play with fire, and it will turn upon them. They
will laugh in the face of God when they snatch his lightnings out of his
hand, and he will reduce them to ashes. But to him who kneels and waits,
into his hand will God put the lightning, and it shall be as dew to his
palm when he smites with it.”
As he had talked, sometimes to them, and then as if to himself, to her
imagination all the space about and above had become filled with
watching faces. There were pale brows over eyes grown dim and hollow
with fruitless study; there were clustering locks that wore the shadow
of a crown; there were dreamy faces whose eyes were filled with visions
of the golden streets of the New Jerusalem; there were the hungry cheeks
and devouring eyes of poverty; there was avarice with human features;
and over the shoulders of these, and peering through their floating hair
or widespread beard, were impish eyes and glimpses of impish mirth; all
which, with sudden explosion, were wrapped one moment in flame, and the
next, fell in a mass of gold like a mountain, writhing one instant, then
fixed. And in the place where they had been remained unscathed one face
still gazing in a dream at the golden streets of the New Jerusalem.
The childish vision rose and fell; but it left a scene almost as unreal.
There showed no more sparkling points in the trough, and Iona changed it
for the other, glancing into the second as she withdrew it. At the
bottom of the net was a spark like a star. It was a little ball of gold
that the water had brought while she was searching. She smiled at sight
of it, scarcely knowing why it pleased her; and instead of putting it
into the wallet, found a dew-softened flake of lichen to wrap it in, and
hid it in her bosom.
“I will ask Dylar if I may give it to Ion when he goes out,” she
thought; and the image of Ion warmed her heart. “Dear boy!” she
murmured.
The dew, the darkness, and the silence soothed her as she walked
homeward. Seen from a distance she might have seemed a glow-worm
creeping along the face of the rock. Her lamp grew dim, and she lighted
her taper again by its expiring flame, and went on uncoiling it as it
rapidly consumed in the faint breeze of her motion.
Weary, and in some way comforted, she reached the castle and her
chamber, and was soon asleep.
But anguish woke with her, the stronger for its repose. The novelty of
the change was gone, and a consuming fever of impatience to return to
San Salvador took possession of her. But she had come for a week, and
she stayed a week, passing such days and nights as made her cheeks thin
and her eyes hollow.
The morning she had set for her return she was scarcely able to rise;
but at noon she reached the Pines, and while everybody in San Salvador
was at supper, she quietly entered the Arcade, and sent for Elena to
come to her room.
“Give these to Dylar with your own hand,” she said, consigning to her
care the wallet and the case of keys. “And please send me some supper
here. I am going up the hills this evening, and may stay all day
to-morrow. Whoever comes with my food can set the basket on the terrace,
if I am not in sight.”
Elena looked at that worn face, and could not restrain an expostulation.
“Iona, dear, you look too tired to go up there alone to-night,” she
said. “Wait till morning, and no one shall come near you, nor even know
that you are here.”
“I should suffocate here!” Iona exclaimed impatiently.
Elena urged her no farther. “At least, make me a sign in the morning
that you are well,” she said. “Tie a white cloth to the terrace post.”
“Yes, yes! Don’t fear!”
She went out. It was twilight, and the windows were beginning to be
lighted. In the Square she saw Ion going toward the college. She drew
the silver whistle from her sash and blew his name.
The boy stopped, then came running back.
“I am going up the hills to stay to-night,” his sister said, holding him
in her arms. “Don’t tell any one, unless Dylar should ask you. And see!
I have a gift for you. It is a little ball of pure gold. Say nothing of
it even to Dylar till I tell you. Keep it as a memento of San Salvador
when you are far away. And now, good-night, my treasure, my better than
gold!”
She kissed him tenderly.
“O Iona, why do you go up there to-night?” the boy cried. “What is the
matter?”
She freed herself from him gently, but decidedly. “Don’t oppose me, Ion.
Do as I bid you, and say good-night now.”
He urged no more, but went away dejectedly.
The cottage to which Iona went was a tiny one with a plot of herbs in
front of it and a huge fig-tree. It contained but one room, across which
was slung a wide hammock. She opened the door, prepared her hammock and
got into it, dressed as she was. There was a floating wick in a vase of
oil and water that gave just light enough to faintly define the objects
in the room and show a small fragment of paper on the floor. As she lay,
glancing restlessly about, her eyes returned again and again to this
paper, and finally with a sense of annoyance. She was naturally orderly
and neat to a fault even; and now it seemed as if all her
characteristics had become either numbed or fantastic. That scrap of
paper grew to be of such importance to her that she could not rest while
it lay there; and having risen to pick it up, it was still of so much
importance to her that she could not set fire to it in the little
night-lamp without looking to see what it was. It was a fragment of an
old pamphlet in which had been an article on mediæval customs. The few
lines remaining referred to a custom in the isle of Guernsey.
It related that if a sale of property were being made by heirs, one heir
objecting, this non-consenting one could stop the sale by crying out:
“_A l’aide, mon prince! On me fait tort!_”
She read, then burned the paper. It was an interesting fact. She thought
it over, going to lie in her hammock again; and thinking of it, dropped
asleep.
There were a few hours of repose. Then she waked and could sleep no
more. The little lamp had burned out, and the dark dewy night looked in
at her open window. She rose and went out.
The fig-tree before her door grew a single straight trunk to a height of
four feet, or a little more, then divided into two great branches,
hollowed out and widespreading. Iona leaned into this hollow, hanging
with all her weight, and looked over the town.
“_A l’aide, mon prince! On me fait tort!_” she murmured, recollecting
the words that she had slept repeating. And she stretched her hands out
toward Dylar’s dwelling-place.
“They think that she alone has power to charm you!” she went on. “Blind
that they are! And are you also blind? They see me preside with dignity,
and they think that I am nothing but stately. Cannot you understand that
I am as full of laughter as a brook? I have come up here alone many a
time and talked with the birds, the plants, and the wind. I came to give
vent to the life that was bubbling in me. If I had but shown it! If I
had but shown it! The greatest force I ever put upon myself was to be
cool and calm with you. It was honor made me. I thought you were
resolved to lead the angelic life, and I would not by a smile, or a
glance, or a wile make it harder for you. How could I imagine that you
would surrender yourself unsought to a lesser woman! Oh, I could have
charmed you! Cannot I call you now? Shall I submit without a struggle?”
Iona knew in herself a compelling power of will, without defining it. It
had sometimes seemed to her that when roused by some vivid interest, her
will had flung out an invisible lasso that bound whomsoever she would;
not so much, indeed, here in San Salvador as out in the world, where
minds were less firmly anchored. Yet even here, finding one in a
receptive mood, she had more than once made him swerve as she had
wished.
Could she not in this hour of supreme upheaval send her soul out—all her
soul—through the space that divided her from Dylar, make it grow around
him like a still moonrise, find him where he lay thinking, or dreaming,
perhaps, of that fair-haired Tacita, reach into, shine into, his heart
and blot that image out, gather all his will into the grasp of her
strong life, and so melt and bend him that he should turn to her as a
flower to the light? Dylar had a strong will. She had seen him as oak
and iron. But, if she should slip in at unawares!
Iona caught herself leaning over, straining over the inverted arch of
the fig-tree, her arms extended toward the college, the fingers cold and
electric, the very locks of her loose hair seeming to be turned that
way, her whole person having a strange feeling as if a strong current of
some sparkling, benumbing essence were flowing from her toward the spot
where Prince Dylar lay helpless and unconscious.
She started back. “God forbid!” she cried. “_A l’aide, mon prince!_” The
last words came as of themselves; and her prince was still Dylar.
“Yet it would be for his good and the good of San Salvador,” she said,
and began to weep.
And then again, half frightened at her own passion, her mood changed.
After all, was she certain that her fears were well-grounded? What proof
had she? Nothing strong except Tacita’s silence; and might she not have
mistaken the significance of that? Her nature seemed to divide itself in
two, one weak, wretched, dying, the other seeking to comfort, reassure,
and save this despairing creature from destruction. Her imagination
began to hold up pictures to divert the weeping child of earth.
She fancied Dylar in the first enthusiasm of knowing all her plans. He
would adore her. But there should be no silly dalliance. For, “I do not
love him in that way,” she still persisted. When she should crown
herself with the white betrothal roses that must be gathered by her own
hand, it would be with the thought of authority wearing the crown of
pure justice. When she should assume the rose-colored robe and veil of a
bride, it would be to her a figure of that charity all over the world
which it would be the aim of her life to promote. Both she and Dylar
would be stronger for this companionship; and she would be, not only his
inspirer, but his soothing and comforting friend also. Every lion in his
path should become his beehive. When he was weary of empire she would
charm him with many a folly. For sometimes he would be depressed,
perhaps, even out of temper. It was delicious to think of him so—as
quite a common man—for a little while. It would be the dear little flaw
in her gem.
All should come as she had planned. Their colonies should condense in
the plain and on the hills outside, little by little, stealing in as
silent as mists, not seeming one, but as strangers to each other. Here
at San Salvador should be their stronghold, as now, and their inmost
sanctuary. But they would live outside, on a hill, or going from place
to place. When all was well ordered without, they would come back for a
while, and she would lead Dylar to some height, to the summit of the
North Peak, where there should be a mirador, and pointing to their
colonies embossing the whole circle even to the horizon, she would say:
“Behold the marriage-portion I brought you!” She would tell him of a
time when, their earthly lives ended, they might be borne, like
Serapeon, over mountain top and plain, while their son—
Their son!
Her fancy descended from its cold mountain height to a green hollow in
the hills, and a cooing of doves, and a veil of heliotrope shutting them
in. She hung over the face of the child. His cradle should be formed
like a lotos-flower, and there he should sit enthroned like Horus, the
young Day. As her fancy dwelt on him, he grew,—a youth with inspiration
shining in his eyes, a man, with command on his brow. He should bring in
a golden age. Peace and brotherly love prevailing should make men look
upon their past lives as the lives of wolves. He should wear white while
young, and purple when he began to take the reins of government. The
white should have a violet border.
Here the dreamer’s fancy seemed to stumble as if caught in the train of
a white robe with a violet border that brought some disenchanting
reminiscence in its folds.
It was the robe that Tacita had worn the last time they met at the
assembly, and she had looked like a Psyche in it.
As that figure floated, smiling, into her dream, Iona’s empire crumbled,
her lover became a mocking delusion, her shining babe faded to a
snow-drop broken from its stem, her enthusiastic youth shrank like dry
leaves, her purple-robed prince fell with a crash at her feet.
“A—a—a—i!”
It was almost like the growl and spring of the tiger. But the rein was
drawn as involuntarily as a falling person seeks to maintain his
equilibrium.
“_A l’aide, mon Roi!_” she cried, and stretched her hands out, not
toward Dylar, but toward the Basilica, showing faint and ghost-like
against the western mountains. “_A l’aide, mon Dieu!_” and lifted her
face to heaven.
To a strong, high soul, despair is impossible. However dark the
overhanging cloud, it never believes that there is no help. It has felt
its own wings in the sunshine, and it knows that somewhere there must be
a way for them to lift it out of the storm.
But where?
“My father told me to do without love, if I could,” thought Iona, and
sank down, and sat leaning against the tree. The time-blurred image of
that father rose before her mind, and the scenes following his death. Of
her life with him, except that it was happy, she could recollect nothing
definite. With the egotism and ignorance of youth she had taken a
father’s loving presence for granted, as she had taken sunshine and air.
He had died at Castle Dylar, and she was with him. His illness was
brief, she had scarcely known that he was ill. For one day only she had
not seen him.
She seemed again to stand, a child, in the middle of the great salon,
looking at a closed door. The prince held her hand and murmured words of
consolation. Her playmate, young Dylar, stood at a distance wistfully
gazing at them. She did not understand for what she needed to be
consoled; but an undefined dread oppressed her.
“What is in that room?” asked the child with a gloomy imperiousness.
“They close the door, and tell me not to open it.”
“Only a mortal body from which the soul has fled,” said the prince.
“Your real father has gone to see the King, to see your dear mother; and
both, unseen, will watch over you and your little brother. Do not you
want to go home and see poor little Ion? He is alone.”
“I want to see my father’s body,” said the child.
“Iona, he sleeps!”
“Wake him, then!” she cried. “Or, no. I will be quiet and let him sleep.
I will sit by him till he wakes.”
Dylar looked distressed. “Dear child, no one ever wakes from that sleep,
it is so full of peace and rest. His heart does not beat. His hands are
as cool as dew.”
“Wake him!” she cried, beginning to sob; and, snatching her hand away,
ran to beat on the door, and call “Father! Father!” with an awful pause
of silence between one call and the other. “If he were warm he would
speak. Give him wine! I can make his heart beat. Let me in! I will go to
him!”
“Nothing can make the body warm when the soul has gone out of it,” said
Dylar, following her to the door. “It is like a candle that is not
lighted.”
“If I kiss him, he will light,” persisted the child. “He always does.”
“His light is in the court of the King,” said Dylar. “You must not,
cannot call it back.”
The child stood silent a moment, a statue of rebellious grief, trying to
understand the cold science of death, now for the first time presented
to her. Then, with something more of self control, she asked:—
“Can I make the King give back his soul, in any way? no matter if it is
not by being good. Could I by being wicked? I am not afraid.”
“By being bad you would only separate yourself still more from your
father. My child, he was not torn away. He went submissively,
obediently. He bade me love you as my own child, and I will. The King
took him gently by the hand. Wait a little while, and he will come for
you.”
The child’s head drooped. She leaned against the door, putting her arms
up to it in a vain and empty embrace. “I want to go in!” she said
faintly.
The prince opened the door and led her in.
A white veiled shape lay stretched out on a narrow bed. The prince
folded back a cloth, and the child’s dilating eyes, startled and
awe-stricken, looked for the first time on death.
“Is it a statue?” she whispered.
“It is his own body in its long sleep.”
“I have always seen him breathe,” she whispered, looking up at her
guardian with frightened eyes. “His breast went up and down—so!” she
panted. “I felt it when he held me in his arms. I did not know that it
could stop.”
Sobs broke out. She threw herself on to the cold breast and clung to it.
“He spoke; and I thought that it was a little thing,” she cried, in a
storm of tears. “Sometimes I did not listen. I thought that I could
always hear him speak. Sometimes he told me to do a thing, and I said
no. I did not think that he would ever be ‘no’ to me. He is all ‘No!’
Speak one word, father! It is Iona. Why can he not speak? This is his
hair, his face, his own self,—all but the cold!”
“He cannot hear you,” said the prince.
The child rose and looked wildly about. “I would climb over all these
mountains, barefoot and alone in the dark, to hear him say one word!”
And then, in that day of revelations, there was yet another which
startled her for a moment out of her own grief. For Prince Dylar,
raising his arms and his face upward, exclaimed with passion: “O
Heavenly Father, do we not expiate the sin, whatever it was!” and for
the first time she saw a man weep.
How vividly it all rose before her! How like was that child to herself!
“How glad I am that I put my arms around him and tried to comfort him!”
she thought.
“My heart has been broken once before, and it healed,” she said, and
returned to the present, where her mind swung idly to and fro, like a
pendulum, counting mechanically the minutes.
The dawn began. It was not like the tingling white fire, alive to its
faintest wave, of dawns that she had seen. It was still and solemn.
“_A l’aide, mon Roi, man Dieu!_” Iona murmured drearily; and speaking,
remembered the invitation: _Come unto me, all ye that labor and are
heavy laden, and I will give you rest_.
What did it mean? She understood duty and obedience toward God; but an
ardent worship of the whole being, a clinging of the spirit through the
sense, she did not understand. It had seemed to her material and
unworthy. She forgot that the sense also is the work of God. The spirit
should rise above the sense, leaving it behind, despising it, she had
thought; but to lift the sense also, to bathe it in that fire that burns
not, to lead it by the hand, like a poor lame sister, into the healing
Presence, that she knew not. Her worship dispersed itself in air.
“I will go to him!” she said. “But where? He is everywhere; therefore he
is here.”
She knelt, folded her hands, and said, “Help me, O Lord! for I am in
bitter need,” and said it wearily. The universal affirmation of his
presence had for effect only universal negation. She did not find him.
The dawn grew. She rose from her knees, weary and faint. “How are we to
know when God helps us? Perhaps when some path shall be opened for me
out of this labyrinth. Is this all that religion can give me?—the
patience of exhaustion, or the apathy of resignation? Is this rest? No
matter! I will obey. I will ask help every day, and try to do my duty.
What is meant by loving God? I cannot love all out-doors. If Christ were
here as he was once upon the earth, he would not make me wait one hour
with my heart all lead. If he were here! Oh, I would walk all barefoot
and alone in the dark over the mountains, over the world, to hear him
speak one word!”
The sun rose, and its golden veil was let down slowly over the western
mountains, creeping toward the Basilica. When it touched, she could see
from where she stood in her door the sparkling of the crown-jewels. They
seemed to rejoice.
“I will go to his house to ask help,” said Iona. “Why should he have a
house among us, if not to give audience there to his children! But now I
must sleep.”
She went to tie her handkerchief on the little balustrade of her terrace
for a sign to Elena, and returning, closed the door, leaving the window
ajar. Getting into her hammock then, she swung herself, to sleep.
It was late in the afternoon when she waked, and the sun was shining
into the room in a long, bright bar through the window. In the midst of
that light was the shadow of a head. As she looked at the shadow-head it
turned aside in a listening attitude.
Iona rose and opened the door, and Ion sprang up joyfully. He had
brought her breakfast and left it outside the door, and come again with
her dinner, both waiting untasted.
“I peeped in and saw that you were asleep,” he said. “Are you not
hungry?”
She ate something, not more from faintness than to please him.
“I was so tired. I worked hard at the Olives, and did not sleep till
late. And now, dear boy, go down. I have something to do, and something
for you to do. To-night, after the people are out of the street, I am
going to the Basilica. I wish to go alone. When the portal is closed,
get the key of the south side door, and leave it in the lock. Thank you
for coming up! You are always good to Iona!”
She kissed him smilingly, and let him go.