Part 5 (1/2)
”Ditto, ditto, to P---, executed by the knife by Croppo's order, for disobedience.
”M--- and F---, and D---, three new members, joined to-day: confessed them, and received the usual fees.”
He was a dark, beetle-browed-looking ruffian, this holy man; and the colonel, when he had finished examining his book of prayer and crime, tossed it to me, saying,--”There! that will show your friends in England the kind of politicians we make war against. Ha! what have we here? This is more serious.” And he unfolded a piece of paper which had been concealed in the breast of the priest. ”This contains a little valuable information,” he added, with a grim smile. ”n.o.body like priests and women for carrying about political secrets, so you may have made a valuable capture,” and he turned to where I stood with Valeria; ”let her be carefully searched.”
Now the colonel was a very pompous man, and the doc.u.ment he had just discovered on the priest added to his sense of self-importance. When, therefore, a large, carefully folded paper was produced from the neighbourhood of Valeria's lovely bosom, his eyes sparkled with antic.i.p.ation. ”Ho, ho!” he exclaimed, as he clutched it eagerly, ”the plot is thickening!” and he spread out triumphantly, before he had himself seen what it was, the exquisitely drawn portrait of a donkey.
There was a suppressed t.i.tter, which exploded into a shout when the bystanders looked into the colonel's indignant face. I only was affected differently, as my gaze fell upon this touching evidence of dear Valeria's love for me, and I glanced at her tenderly. ”This has a deeper significance than you think for,” said the colonel, looking round angrily. ”Croppo's wife does not carefully secrete a drawing like that on her person for nothing. See, it is done by no common artist. It means something, and must be preserved.”
”It may have a Biblical reference to the state of Italy. You remember Issachar was likened to an a.s.s between two burdens. In that case it probably emanated from Rome,” I remarked; but n.o.body seemed to see the point of the allusion, and the observation fell flat.
That night I dined with the colonel, and after dinner I persuaded him to let me visit Valeria in prison, as I wished to take the portrait of the wife of the celebrated brigand chief. I thanked my stars that my friend who had seen her when we met in the glen, was away on duty with his detachment, and could not testify to our former acquaintance. My meeting with Valeria on this occasion was too touching and full of tender pa.s.sages to be of any general interest. Valeria told me that she was still a bride; that she had only been married a few months, and that she had been compelled to become Croppo's wife against her choice, as the brigand's will was too powerful to be resisted; but that, though he was jealous and attached to her, he was stern and cruel, and so far from winning her love since her marriage, he had rather estranged it by his fits of pa.s.sion and ferocity. As may be imagined, the portrait, which was really very successful, took some time in execution, the more especially as we had to discuss the possibilities of Valeria's escape.
”We are going to be transferred to-morrow to the prison at Foggia,” she said. ”If, while we were pa.s.sing through the market-place, a disturbance of some sort could be created, as it is market day, and all the country people know me, and are my friends, a rescue might be attempted. I know how to arrange for that, only they must see some chance of success.”
A bright thought suddenly struck me; it was suggested by a trick I had played shortly after my arrival in Italy.
”You know I am something of a magician, Valeria; you have had proof of that. If I create a disturbance by magic to-morrow, when you are pa.s.sing through the market-place, you won't stay to wonder what is the cause of the confusion, but instantly take advantage of it to escape.”
”Trust me for that, _caro mio_.”
”And if you escape, when shall we meet again?”
”I am known too well now to risk another meeting. I shall be in hiding with Croppo, where it will be impossible for you to find me, nor while he lives could I ever dare to think of leaving him; but I shall never forget you”--and she pressed my hands to her lips--”though I shall no longer have the picture of the donkey to remember you by.”
”See, here's my photograph; that will be better,” said I, feeling a little annoyed--foolishly, I admit. Then we strained each other to our respective hearts, and parted. Now it so happened that my room in the _locanda_ in which I was lodging overlooked the market-place. Here at ten o'clock in the morning I posted myself--for that was the hour, as I had been careful to ascertain, when the prisoners were to start for Foggia. I opened the window about three inches, and fixed it there: I took out my gun, put eight b.a.l.l.s in it, and looked down upon the square.
It was crowded with the country people in their bright-coloured costumes, chaffering over their produce. I looked above them to the tall campanile of the church which filled one side of the square. I receded a step and adjusted my gun on the ledge of the window to my entire satisfaction. I then looked down the street in which the prison was situated, and which debouched on the square, and awaited events. At ten minutes past ten I saw the soldiers at the door of the prison form up, and then I knew that the twenty prisoners of whom they formed the escort were starting; but the moment they began to move, I fired at the big bell in the campanile, which responded with a loud clang. All the people in the square looked up. As the prisoners entered the square, which they had to cross in its whole breadth, I fired again and again. The bell banged twice, and the people began to buzz about. Now, I thought, I must let the old bell have it. By the time five more b.a.l.l.s had struck the bell with a resounding din, the whole square was in commotion. A miracle was evidently in progress, or the campanile was bewitched. People began to run hither and thither; all the soldiers forming the escort gaped open-mouthed at the steeple as the clangour continued. As soon as the last shot had been fired, I looked down into the square and saw all this, and I saw that the prisoners were attempting to escape, and in more than one instance had succeeded, for the soldiers began to scatter in pursuit, and the country people to form themselves into impeding crowds, as though by accident, but nowhere could I see Valeria. When I was quite sure she had escaped, I went down and joined the crowd. I saw three prisoners captured and brought back; and when I asked the officer in command how many had escaped, he said three--Croppo's wife, the priest, and another.
When I met my cavalry friends at dinner that evening, it was amusing to hear them speculate upon the remarkable occurrence which had, in fact, upset the wits of the whole town. Priests and vergers and sacristans had visited the campanile, and one of them had brought away a flattened piece of lead, which looked as if it might have been a bullet; but the suggestion that eight bullets could have hit the bell in succession without anybody hearing a sound, was treated with ridicule. I believe the bell was subsequently exorcised with holy water. I was afraid to remain with the regiment with my air-gun after this, lest some one should discover it, and unravel the mystery; besides, I felt a sort of traitor to the brave friends who had so generously offered me their hospitality, so I invented urgent private affairs, which demanded my immediate return to Naples, and on the morning of my departure found myself embraced by all the officers of the regiment, from the colonel downwards, who, in the fervour of their kisses, thrust sixteen waxed moustache-points against my cheeks.
About eighteen months after this, I heard of the capture and execution of Croppo, and I knew that Valeria was free; but I had unexpectedly inherited a property, and was engaged to be married. I am now a country gentleman with a large family. My sanctum is stocked with various mementoes of my youthful adventures, but none awakens in me such thrilling memories as are excited by the breviary of the brigand priest, and the portrait of the brigand's bride.
THE SISTERS OF THIBET.
It is now nearly twenty-seven years ago--long before the Theosophical Society was founded, or Esoteric Buddhism was known to exist in the form recently revealed to us by Mr Sinnett{81}--that I became the _chela_, or pupil, of an adept of Buddhist occultism in Khatmandhu. At that time Englishmen, unless attached to the Residency, were not permitted to reside in that picturesque Nepaulese town. Indeed I do not think that they are now; but I had had an opportunity during the Indian Mutiny, when I was attached to the Nepaulese contingent, of forming an intimacy with a ”Guru” connected with the force. It was not until our acquaintance had ripened into a warm friends.h.i.+p that I gradually made the discovery that this interesting man held views which differed so widely from the popular conception of Buddhism as I had known it in Ceylon--where I had resided for some years--that my curiosity was roused,--the more especially as he was in the habit of sinking off gradually, even while I was speaking to him, into trance-conditions, which would last sometimes for a week, during which time he would remain without food; and upon more than one occasion I missed even his material body from my side, under circ.u.mstances which appeared to me at the time unaccountable. The Nepaulese troops were not very often engaged with the rebels during the Indian Mutiny; but when they were, the Guru was always to be seen under the hottest fire, and it was generally supposed by the army that his body, so far from being impervious to bullets, was so pervious to them that they could pa.s.s through it without producing any organic disturbance. I was not aware of this fact at first; and it was not until I observed that, while he stood directly in the line of fire, men were killed immediately behind him, that I ceased to accompany him into action, and determined, if possible, to solve a mystery which had begun to stimulate my curiosity to the highest pitch. It is not necessary for me to enter here into the nature of the conversations I had with him on the most important and vital points affecting universal cosmogony and the human race and its destiny. Suffice it to say, that they determined me to sever my connection with the Government of India; to apply privately, through my friend the Guru, to the late Jung Bahadoor for permission to reside in Nepaul; and finally, in the garb of an Oriental, to take up my residence in Khatmandhu, unknown to the British authorities. I should not now venture on this record of my experiences, or enter upon the revelation of a phase hitherto unknown and unsuspected, of that esoteric science which has, until now, been jealously guarded as a precious heritage belonging exclusively to regularly initiated members of mysteriously organised a.s.sociations, had not Mr Sinnett, with the consent of a distinguished member of the Thibetan brotherhood, and, in fact, at his dictation, let, if I may venture to use so profane an expression in connection with such a sacred subject, ”the cat out of the bag.” Since, however, the _arhats_, or illuminati, of the East, seem to have arrived at the conclusion that the Western mind is at last sufficiently prepared and advanced in spiritual knowledge to be capable of a.s.similating the occult doctrines of Esoteric Buddhism, and have allowed their pupil to burst them upon a thoughtless and frivolous society with the suddenness of a bomb-sh.e.l.l, I feel released from the obligations to secrecy by which I have hitherto felt bound, and will proceed to unfold a few arcana of a far more extraordinary character than any which are to be found even in the pages of the 'Theosophist' or of 'Esoteric Buddhism.'
Owing to certain conditions connected with my _linga sharira_, or ”astral body”--which it would be difficult for me to explain to those who are not to some extent initiated--I pa.s.sed through the various degrees of _chela_- s.h.i.+p with remarkable rapidity. When I say that in less than fifteen years of spiritual absorption and profound contemplation of esoteric mysteries I became a _mahatma_, or adept, some idea may be formed by _chelas_ who are now treading that path of severe ordeal, of the rapidity of my progress: indeed, such extraordinary faculty did I manifest, that at one time the Guru, my master, was inclined to think that I was one of those exceptional cases which recur from time to time, where a child-body is selected as the human tenement of a reincarnated adept; and that though belonging by rights to the fourth round, I was actually born into the fifth round of the human race in the planetary chain. ”The adept,”
says an occult aphorism, ”becomes; he is not made.” That was exactly my case. I attribute it princ.i.p.ally to an overweening confidence in myself, and to a blind faith in others. As Mr Sinnett very properly remarks--
”Very much further than people generally imagine, will mere confidence carry the occult neophyte. How many European readers who would be quite incredulous if told of some results which occult _chelas_ in the most incipient stages of their training have to accomplish by sheer force of confidence, hear constantly in church, nevertheless, the familiar Biblical a.s.surances of the power which resides in faith, and let the words pa.s.s by like the wind, leaving no impression!”
It is true that I had some reason for this confidence--which arose from the fact that prior to my initiation into Buddhist mysteries, and before I left England, I had developed, under the spiritual craze which was then prevalent in society, a remarkable faculty of clairvoyance. This gave me the power not merely of diagnosing the physical and moral conditions of my friends and acquaintances, and of prescribing for them when necessary, but of seeing what was happening in other parts of the world; hence my organism was peculiarly favourable for initiation into occult mysteries, and naturally--or rather spiritually--prepared for that method in the regular course of occult training by which adepts impart instruction to their pupils.
”They awaken,” as we are most accurately informed by Mr Sinnett, ”the dormant sense in the pupil, and through this they imbue his mind with a knowledge that such and such a doctrine is the real truth. The whole scheme of evolution infiltrates into the regular _chela's_ mind, by reason of the fact that he is made to see the process taking place by clairvoyant vision. There are no words used in his instruction at all. And adepts themselves, to whom the facts and processes of nature are as familiar as our five fingers to us, find it difficult to explain in a treatise which they cannot ill.u.s.trate for us, by producing mental pictures in our dormant sixth sense, the complex anatomy of the planetary system.”
I have always felt--and my conviction on the subject has led to some painful discussions between myself and some of my _mahatma_ brothers--that the extreme facility with which I was enabled to perceive at a glance ”the complex anatomy of the planetary system,” and the rapid development of my ”dormant sixth sense,” was due mainly to the fact that I was nothing more nor less than what spiritualists call a highly sensitive medium. Meantime this premature development of my sixth sense forced me right up through the obstacles which usually impede such an operation in the case of a fourth-round man, into that stage of evolution which awaits the rest of humanity--or rather, so much of humanity as may reach it in the ordinary course of nature--in the latter part of the fifth round. I merely mention this to give confidence to my readers, as I am about to describe a moral cataclysm which subsequently took place in my sixth sense, which would be of no importance in the case of an ordinary _chela_, but which was attended with the highest significance as occurring to a _mahatma_ who had already attained the highest grade in the mystic brotherhood. It was not to be wondered at that when I arrived at this advanced condition, Khatmandhu, though a pleasant town, was not altogether a convenient residence for an occultist of my eminence. In the first place, the streets were infested with _dugpas_, or red-caps, a heretical sect, some members of which have _arhat_ pretensions of a very high order--indeed I am ready to admit that I have met with Shammar adepts, who, so far as supernatural powers were concerned, were second to none among ourselves. But this was only the result of that necromancy which Buddha in his sixth incarnation denounced in the person of Tsong- kha-pa, the great reformer. They even deny the spiritual supremacy of the Dalai Lama at Lha.s.sa, and own allegiance to an impostor who lives at the monastery of Sakia Djong.
The presence of these men, and the presumption of their adepts, who maintained that through subjective or clairvoyant conditions, which they a.s.serted were higher than ours, they had attained a more exalted degree of illumination which revealed a different cosmogony from that which has been handed down to us through countless generations of adepts, were a perpetual annoyance to me; but perhaps not greater than the proximity of the English Resident and the officers attached to him, the impure exhalations from whose _rupas_, or material bodies, infected as they were with magnetic elements drawn from Western civilisation, whenever I met them, used to send me to bed for a week. I therefore strongly felt the necessity of withdrawal to that isolated and guarded region where the most advanced adepts can pursue their contemplative existence without fear of interruption, and prepare their _karma_, or, in other words, the molecules of their fifth principle, for the ineffable bliss of appropriate development in _devachan_--a place, or rather ”state,”
somewhat resembling Purgatory with a dash of heaven in it; or even for the still more exquisite sensation which arises from having no sensations at all, and which characterises _nirvana_, or a sublime condition of conscious rest in Omniscience.
That I am not drawing upon my imagination in alluding to this mysterious region, or imposing upon the credulity of my readers, I will support my a.s.sertion by the high authority of Mr Sinnett, or rather of his Guru; and here I may remark incidentally, that after a long experience of Gurus, I have never yet met one who would consciously tell a lie.