She
It is like the aloe of Arabia that blooms but once and dies; it
blooms in the salt emptiness of Life, and the brightness of its
beauty is set upon the waste as a star is set upon a storm.
It hath the sun above that is the Spirit, and above it blows the
air of its divinity.
At the echoing of a step, Love blooms, I say; I say Love blooms,
and bends her beauty down to him who passeth by.
He plucketh it, yea, he plucketh the red cup that is full of
honey, and beareth it away; away across the desert, away till the
flower be withered, away till the desert be done.
There is only one perfect flower in the wilderness of Life.
That flower is Love!
There is only one fixed star in the midsts of our wandering.
That star is Love!
There is only one hope in our despairing night.
That hope is Love!
All else is false. All else is shadow moving upon water. All else
is wind and vanity.
Who shall say what is the weight or the measure of Love?
It is born of the flesh, it dwelleth in the spirit. From each
doth it draw its comfort.
For beauty it is as a star.
Many are its shapes, but all are beautiful, and none know where
the star rose, or the horizon where it shall set.
Then, turning to Leo, and laying her hand upon his shoulder, she
went on in a fuller and more triumphant tone, speaking in
balanced sentences that gradually grew and swelled from idealised
prose into pure and majestic verse:—
Long have I loved thee, oh, my love; yet has my love not
lessened.
Long have I waited for thee, and behold my reward is at hand—is
here!
Far away I saw thee once, and thou wast taken from me.
Then in a grave sowed I the seed of patience, and shone upon it
with the sun of hope, and watered it with tears of repentance,
and breathed on it with the breath of my knowledge. And now, lo!
it hath sprung up, and borne fruit. Lo! out of the grave hath it
sprung. Yea, from among the dry bones and ashes of the dead.
I have waited and my reward is with me.
I have overcome Death, and Death brought back to me him that was
dead.
Therefore do I rejoice, for fair is the future.
Green are the paths that we shall tread across the everlasting
meadows.
The hour is at hand. Night hath fled away into the valleys.
The dawn kisseth the mountain tops.
Soft shall we live, my love, and easy shall we go.
Crowned shall we be with the diadem of Kings.
Worshipping and wonder struck all peoples of the world, Blinded
shall fall before our beauty and might.
From time unto times shall our greatness thunder on, Rolling like
a chariot through the dust of endless days.
Laughing shall we speed in our victory and pomp, Laughing like
the Daylight as he leaps along the hills.
Onward, still triumphant to a triumph ever new!
Onward, in our power to a power unattained!
Onward, never weary, clad with splendour for a robe!
Till accomplished be our fate, and the night is rushing down.
She paused in her strange and most thrilling allegorical chant,
of which I am, unfortunately, only able to give the burden, and
that feebly enough, and then said—
“Perchance thou dost not believe my word, Kallikrates—perchance
thou thinkest that I do delude thee, and that I have not lived
these many years, and that thou hast not been born again to me.
Nay, look not so—put away that pale cast of doubt, for oh be sure
herein can error find no foothold! Sooner shall the suns forget
their course and the swallow miss her nest, than my soul shall
swear a lie and be led astray from thee, Kallikrates. Blind me,
take away mine eyes, and let the darkness utterly fence me in,
and still mine ears would catch the tone of thy unforgotten
voice, striking more loud against the portals of my sense than
can the call of brazen-throated clarions:—stop up mine hearing
also, and let a thousand touch me on the brow, and I would name
thee out of all:—yea, rob me of every sense, and see me stand
deaf and blind, and dumb, and with nerves that cannot weigh the
value of a touch, yet would my spirit leap within me like a
quickening child and cry unto my heart, behold Kallikrates!
behold, thou watcher, the watches of thy night are ended! behold
thou who seekest in the night season, thy morning Star ariseth.”
She paused awhile and then continued, “But stay, if thy heart is
yet hardened against the mighty truth and thou dost require a
further pledge of that which thou dost find too deep to
understand, even now shall it be given to thee, and to thee also,
oh my Holly. Bear each one of you a lamp, and follow after me
whither I shall lead you.”
Without stopping to think—indeed, speaking for myself, I had
almost abandoned the function in circumstances under which to
think seemed to be absolutely useless, since thought fell hourly
helpless against a black wall of wonder—we took the lamps and
followed her. Going to the end of her “boudoir,” she raised a
curtain and revealed a little stair of the sort that is so common
in these dim caves of Kôr. As we hurried down the stair I
observed that the steps were worn in the centre to such an extent
that some of them had been reduced from seven and a half inches,
at which I guessed their original height, to about three and a
half. Now, all the other steps that I had seen in the caves were
practically unworn, as was to be expected, seeing that the only
traffic which ever passed upon them was that of those who bore a
fresh burden to the tomb. Therefore this fact struck my notice
with that curious force with which little things do strike us
when our minds are absolutely overwhelmed by a sudden rush of
powerful sensations; beaten flat, as it were, like a sea beneath
the first burst of a hurricane, so that every little object on
the surface starts into an unnatural prominence.
At the bottom of the staircase I stood and stared at the worn
steps, and Ayesha, turning, saw me.
“Wonderest thou whose are the feet that have worn away the rock,
my Holly?” she asked. “They are mine—even mine own light feet! I
can remember when those stairs were fresh and level, but for two
thousand years and more have I gone down hither day by day, and
see, my sandals have worn out the solid rock!”
I made no answer, but I do not think that anything that I had
heard or seen brought home to my limited understanding so clear a
sense of this being’s overwhelming antiquity as that hard rock
hollowed out by her soft white feet. How many hundreds of
thousands of times must she have passed up and down that stair to
bring about such a result?
The stair led to a tunnel, and a few paces down the tunnel was
one of the usual curtain-hung doorways, a glance at which told me
that it was the same where I had been a witness of that terrible
scene by the leaping flame. I recognised the pattern of the
curtain, and the sight of it brought the whole event vividly
before my eyes, and made me tremble even at its memory. Ayesha
entered the tomb (for it was a tomb), and we followed her—I, for
one, rejoicing that the mystery of the place was about to be
cleared up, and yet afraid to face its solution.
XXI.
THE DEAD AND LIVING MEET
“See now the place where I have slept for these two thousand
years,” said Ayesha, taking the lamp from Leo’s hand and holding
it above her head. Its rays fell upon a little hollow in the
floor, where I had seen the leaping flame, but the fire was out
now. They fell upon the white form stretched there beneath its
wrappings upon its bed of stone, upon the fretted carving of the
tomb, and upon another shelf of stone opposite the one on which
the body lay, and separated from it by the breadth of the cave.
“Here,” went on Ayesha, laying her hand upon the rock—“here have
I slept night by night for all these generations, with but a
cloak to cover me. It did not become me that I should lie soft
when my spouse yonder,” and she pointed to the rigid form, “lay
stiff in death. Here night by night have I slept in his cold
company—till, thou seest, this thick slab, like the stairs down
which we passed, has worn thin with the tossing of my form—so
faithful have I been to thee even in thy space of sleep,
Kallikrates. And now, mine own, thou shalt see a wonderful
thing—living, thou shalt behold thyself dead—for well have I
tended thee during all these years, Kallikrates. Art thou
prepared?”
We made no answer, but gazed at each other with frightened eyes,
the whole scene was so dreadful and so solemn. Ayesha advanced,
and laid her hand upon the corner of the shroud, and once more
spoke.
“Be not affrighted,” she said; “though the thing seem wonderful
to thee—all we who live have thus lived before; nor is the very
shape that holds us a stranger to the sun! Only we know it not,
because memory writes no record, and earth hath gathered in the
earth she lent us, for none have saved our glory from the grave.
But I, by my arts and by the arts of those dead men of Kôr which
I have learned, have held thee back, oh Kallikrates, from the
dust, that the waxen stamp of beauty on thy face should ever rest
before mine eye. ‘Twas a mask that memory might fill, serving to
fashion out thy presence from the past, and give it strength to
wander in the habitations of my thought, clad in a mummery of
life that stayed my appetite with visions of dead days.
“Behold now, let the Dead and Living meet! Across the gulf of
Time they still are one. Time hath no power against Identity,
though sleep the merciful hath blotted out the tablets of our
mind, and with oblivion sealed the sorrows that else would hound
us from life to life, stuffing the brain with gathered griefs
till it burst in the madness of uttermost despair. Still are they
one, for the wrappings of our sleep shall roll away as
thunder-clouds before the wind; the frozen voice of the past
shall melt in music like mountain snows beneath the sun; and the
weeping and the laughter of the lost hours shall be heard once
more most sweetly echoing up the cliffs of immeasurable time.
“Ay, the sleep shall roll away, and the voices shall be heard,
when down the completed chain, whereof our each existence is a
link, the lightning of the Spirit hath passed to work out the
purpose of our being; quickening and fusing those separated days
of life, and shaping them to a staff whereon we may safely lean
as we wend to our appointed fate.
“Therefore, have no fear, Kallikrates, when thou—living, and but
lately born—shalt look upon thine own departed self, who breathed
and died so long ago. I do but turn one page in thy Book of
Being, and show thee what is writ thereon.
“_Behold!_”
With a sudden motion she drew the shroud from the cold form, and
let the lamplight play upon it. I looked, and then shrank back