Part 39 (2/2)

”I was like Eve when she left the Tree; knowledge was mine, only I had eaten of the fruit of Life. Yet the taste of it must be bitter in my mouth. What have I done? I have given my spirit into the keeping of a man who is pledged to another woman, and, as I think, have taken his from her keeping to my own. What then? Is this other woman, who is so good and kind, to be robbed of all that is left to her in the world? Am I to take from her him who is almost her husband? Never. If his heart has come to me I cannot help it--for the rest, no. So what is left to me? His spirit and all the future when the flesh is done with; that is heritage enough. How the philosopher who argued about the love of men and women would laugh and mock if he could see these words. Supposing that he could say, 'Stella Fregelius, I am in a position to offer you a choice. Will you have this man for your husband and live out your natural lives upon the strict stipulation that your relations.h.i.+p ends absolutely and forever with your last breaths? Or will you let him go to the other woman for their natural lives with the prospect of that heritage which your imagination has fas.h.i.+oned; that dim eternity of double joy where, hand in hand, twain and yet one, you will fulfil the secret purpose of your destinies?'

”What should I answer then?

”Before Heaven I would answer that I would not sell myself to the devil of the flesh and of this present world. What! Barter my birthright of immortality for the mess of pottage of a few brief years of union? Pay out my high hopes to their last bright coin for this dinner of mingled herbs? Drain the well of faith dug with so many prayers and labours, that its waters may suffice to nourish a rose planted in the sand, whose blooms must die at the first touch of creeping earthly frost?

”The philosopher would say that I was mad; that the linnet in the hand is better than all the birds of paradise which ever flew in fabled tropic seas.

”I reply that I am content to wait till upon some glorious morning my s.h.i.+p breaks into the silence of those seas, and, watching from her battered bulwarks, I behold the islands of the Blest and catch the scent of heavenly flowers, and see the jewelled birds, whereof I dream floating from palm to palm.

”'But if there are no such isles?' he would answer; 'If, with their magic birds and flowers, they are indeed but the baseless fabric of a dream? If your s.h.i.+p, amidst the ravings of the storm and the darkness of the tortured night, should founder once and for ever in the dark strait which leads to the gateways of that Dawn--those gateways through which no traveller returns to lay his fellows' course for the harbours of your perfect sea; what then?'

”Then I would say, let me forswear G.o.d Who has suffered me to be deceived with false spirits, and sink to depths where no light breaks, where no memories stir, where no hopes torment. Yes, then let me deny Him and die, who am of all women the most miserable. But it is not so, for to me a messenger has _come_; at my prayer once the Gates were opened, and now I know quite surely that it was permitted to me to see within them that I might find strength in this the bitter hour of my trial.

”Yet how can I choke the truth and tread down the human heart within me?

Oh! the road which my naked feet must tread is full of thorns, and heavy the cross that I must bear. I go now, in a few minutes' time, to bid him farewell. If I can help it I shall never see him again. No, not even after many years, since it is better not. Also, perhaps this is weakness, but I should wish him to remember me wearing such beauty as I have and still young, before time and grief and labour have marked me with their ugly scars. It is the Stella whom he found singing at the daybreak on the s.h.i.+p which brought her to him, for whom I desire that he should seek in the hour of a different dawn.

”I go presently, to my marriage, as it were; a cold and pitiful feast, many would think it--these nuptials of life-long renunciation. The philosopher would say, Why renounce? You have some advantages, some powers, use them. The man loves you, play upon his natural weakness.

Help yourself to the thing that chances to be desirable in your eyes.

Three years hence who will blame you, who will even remember? His father? Well, he likes you already, and in time a man of the world accepts accomplished facts, especially if things go well, as they will do, for that invention must succeed. No one else? Yes; three others. He would remember, however much he loved me, for I should have brought him to do a shameful act. And she would remember, whom I had robbed of her husband, coming into his life after he had promised himself to her. Last of all--most of all, perhaps--I myself should remember, day by day, and hour by hour, that I was nothing more than one of the family of thieves.

”No; I will have none of such philosophy; at least I, Stella Fregelius, will live and die among the upright. So I go to my cold marriage, such as it is; so I bend my back to the burden, so I bow my head to the storm; and throughout it all I thank G.o.d for what he has been pleased to send me. I may seem poor, but how rich I am who have been dowered with a love that I know to be eternal as my eternal soul. I go, and my husband shall receive me, not with a lover's kiss and tenderness, but with words few and sad, with greetings that, almost before their echoes die, must fade into farewells. I wrap no veil about my head, he will set no ring upon my hand, perchance we shall plight no troth. So be it; our hour of harvest is not yet.

”Yesterday was very sharp and bleak, with scuds of sleet and snow driven by the wind, but as I drove here with my father I saw a man and a woman in the midst of an empty, lifeless field, planting some winter seed.

Who, looking at them, who that did not know, could foretell the fruits of their miserable, unhopeful labour? Yet the summer will come and the sweet smell of the flowering beans, and the song of the nesting birds, and the plentiful reward of the year crowned with fatness. It is a symbol of this marriage of mine. To-day we sow the seed; next, after a s.p.a.ce of raving rains and winds, will follow the long, white winter of death, then some dim, sweet spring of awakening, and beyond it the fulness of all joy.

”What is there about me that it would make me ashamed that he should know; this husband to whom I must tell nothing? I cannot think. No other man has been anything to me. I can remember no great sin. I have worked, making the best of such gifts as I possess. I have tried to do my duty, and I will do it to the end. Surely my heart is whole and my hands are clean. Perhaps it is a sin that I should have learned to love him; that I should look to a far future where I may be with him. If so, am I to blame, who ask nothing here? Can I conquer destiny who am its child? Can I read or shape the purpose of my Maker?

”And so I go. O G.o.d, I pray Thee of Thy mercy, give me strength to bear my temptations and my trials; and to him, also, give every strength and blessing. O Father, I pray Thee of Thy mercy, shorten these the days of my tribulation upon earth. Accept and sanctify this my sacrifice of denial; grant me pardon here, and hereafter through all the abyss of time in Thy knowledge and presence, that perfect peace which I desire with him to whom I am appointed. Amen.”

CHAPTER XXII

THE EVIL GATE

Such was the end of the diary of Stella.

Morris shut the book with something like a sob. Then he rose and began to tramp up and down the length of the long, lonely room, while thoughts, crowded, confused, and overwhelming, pressed in upon his mind.

What a woman was this whom he had lost! Who had known another so pure, so spiritual? Surely she did not belong to this world, and therefore her last prayer was so quickly answered, therefore Heaven took her.

Many reading those final pages might have said with the philosopher she imagined that the shock of love and the sorrow of separation had turned her brain, and that she was mad. For who, so such might argue, would think that person otherwise than mad who dared to translate into action, and on earth to set up as a ruling star, that faith which day by day their lips professed.

Yet it would seem after that this ”dreamer and mystic” Stella believed in nothing which our religion, accepted by millions without cavil, does not promise to its votaries. Its revelations and rewards marked the extremest limits of her fantasy; immortality of the personal soul, its foundation stone, was the rock on which she built. A heaven where there is no earthly marriage, but where each may consort with the souls most loved and most desired; where all sorrows are forgotten, all tears are wiped away, all purposes made clear, reserved for those who deny themselves, do their duty, and seek forgiveness of their sins--this heaven conceived by Stella, is it not vowed to us in the pages of the Gospel? Is it not vowed again and again, sometimes with more detail, sometimes with less; sometimes in open, simple words, sometimes wrapped in the mystic allegory of the visions of St. John; but everywhere and continually held before us as our crown and great reward? And the rest, such things as her belief in guardian angels, and that it had been given to her mortal eyes to behold and commune with a beloved ghost, is there not ample warrant for them in those inspired writings? Were not the dead seen of many in Jerusalem on the night of fear, and are we not told of ”ministering spirits sent forth to do service for the sake of them that shall inherit salvation?” and of the guardian angels, who look continually upon the Father?

Now it all grew clear to Morris. In Stella he beheld an example of the doctrines of Christianity really inspiring the daily life of the believer. If her strong faith animated all those who served under that banner, then in like circ.u.mstances they would act as she had acted.

They would have no doubts; their fears would vanish; their griefs be comforted, and, to a great extent, even the promptings and pa.s.sions of their mortality would be trodden under foot. With Stella they would be ready to neglect the temporary in their certainty of the eternal, and even to welcome death, to them in truth, and not in mere convention, the Gate of Life.

Many things are promised to those who can achieve faith. Stella achieved it and became endued with some portion of the promise. Spiritual faith, not inherited, nor accepted, but hard-won by personal struggle and experience; that was the key-note to her character and the explanation of her actions. Yet that faith, when examined into, was nothing exotic; no combination of mysticism and mummery, but one founded upon the daily creed of the English and its fellow churches, and understood and applied to the circ.u.mstances of a life which was as brief as it seemed to be unfortunate. This was Morris's discovery, open and obvious enough, and yet at first until he grew accustomed to it, a thing marvellous in his eyes; one, moreover, in which he found comfort; since surely that straight but simple path was such as his feet might follow.

And she loved him. Oh! how she had loved him. There could be no doubt; there were her words written in that book, not hastily spoken beneath the pressure of some sudden wind of feeling, but set down in black and white, thought over, reasoned out, and recorded. And then their purport.

They were a paean of pa.s.sion, but the dirge of its denial. They dwelt upon the natural hopes of woman only to put them by.

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