Part 10 (1/2)

I had enjoyed being among them. The rhythm of happiness that swept like a strain of sweet music through all their daily life, touched a chord in my own nature that responded.

And when I contrasted the prosperity of Mizora--a prosperity that reached every citizen in its vast territory--with the varied phases of life that are found in my own land, it urged me to inquire if there could be hope for such happiness within its borders.

To the Preceptress, whose sympathies I knew were broad as the lap of nature, I at last went with my desire and perplexities. A sketch of my country's condition was the inevitable prelude. I gave it without once alluding to the presence of Man. She listened quietly and attentively.

Her own land lay like a charming picture before her. I spoke of its peaceful happiness, its perfected refinement, its universal wealth, and paramount to all its other blessings, its complete ignorance of social ills. With them, love did not confine itself to families, but encircled the Nation in one embrace. How dismal, in contrast, was the land that had given me birth.

”But one eminent distinction exists among us as a people,” I added in conclusion. ”We are not all of one race.”

I paused and looked at the Preceptress. She appeared lost in reverie.

Her expression was one of solicitude and approached nearer to actual pain than anything I had ever noticed upon it before. She looked up and caught my eye regarding her. Then she quietly asked:

”_Are there men in your country?_”

PART SECOND.

CHAPTER I.

I answered in the affirmative, and further added that I had a husband and a son.

The effect of a confession so simple, and so natural, wounded and amazed me.

The Preceptress started back with a look of loathing and abhorrence; but it was almost instantly succeeded by one of compa.s.sion.

”You have much to learn,” she said gently, ”and I desire not to judge you harshly. _You_ are the product of a people far back in the darkness of civilization. _We_ are a people who have pa.s.sed beyond the boundary of what was once called Natural Law. But, more correctly, we have become mistresses of Nature's peculiar processes. We influence or control them at will. But before giving you any further explanation I will show you the gallery containing the portraits of our very ancient ancestors.”

She then conducted me into a remote part of the National College, and sliding back a panel containing a magnificent painting, she disclosed a long gallery, the existence of which I had never suspected, although I knew their custom of using ornamented sliding panels instead of doors.

Into this I followed her with wonder and increasing surprise. Paintings on canvas, old and dim with age; paintings on porcelain, and a peculiar transparent material, of which I have previously spoken, hung so thick upon the wall you could not have placed a hand between them. They were all portraits of men. Some were represented in the ancient or mediaeval costumes of my own ancestry, and some in garbs resembling our modern styles.

Some had n.o.ble countenances, and some bore on their painted visages the unmistakable stamp of pa.s.sion and vice. It is not complimentary to myself to confess it, but I began to feel an odd kind of companions.h.i.+p in this a.s.sembly of good and evil looking men, such as I had not felt since entering this land of pre-eminently n.o.ble and lovely women.

As I gazed upon them, arrayed in the armor of some stern warrior, or the velvet doublet of some gay cavalier, the dark eyes of a debonair knight looked down upon me with familiar fellows.h.i.+p. There was pride of birth, and the pa.s.sion of conquest in every line of his haughty, sensuous face.

I seemed to breathe the same moral atmosphere that had surrounded me in the outer world.

_They_ had lived among n.o.ble and ign.o.ble deeds I felt sure. _They_ had been swayed by conflicting desires. _They_ had known temptation and resistance, and reluctant compliance. _They_ had experienced the treachery and ingrat.i.tude of humanity, and had dealt in it themselves.

_They_ had known joy as I had known it, and their sorrow had been as my sorrows. _They_ had loved as I had loved, and sinned as I had sinned, and suffered as I had suffered.

I wept for the first time since my entrance into Mizora, the bitter tears of actual experience, and endeavored to convey to the Preceptress some idea of the painful emotion that possessed me.

”I have noticed,” she said, ”in your own person and the descriptions you have given of your native country, a close resemblance to the people and history of our nation in ages far remote. These portraits are very old.

The majority of them were painted many thousands of years ago. It is only by our perfect knowledge of color that we are enabled to preserve them. Some have been copied by expert artists upon a material manufactured by us for that purpose. It is a transparent adamant that possesses no refractive power, consequently the picture has all the advantage of a painting on canvas, with the addition of perpetuity. They can never fade nor decay.”

”I am astonished at the existence of this gallery,” I exclaimed. ”I have observed a preference for sliding panels instead of doors, and that they were often decorated with paintings of rare excellence, but I had never suspected the existence of this gallery behind one of them.”

”Any student,” said the Preceptress, ”who desires to become conversant with our earliest history, can use this gallery. It is not a secret, for nothing in Mizora is concealed; but we do not parade its existence, nor urge upon students an investigation of its history. They are so far removed from the moral imbecility that dwarfed the nature of these people, that no lesson can be learned from their lives; and their time can be so much more profitably spent in scientific research and study.”