“Oh, great Heaven!” gasped Leo, “art thou a woman?”
“A woman in truth—in very truth—and thine own spouse, Kallikrates!” she answered, stretching out her rounded ivory arms towards him, and smiling, ah, so sweetly!
He looked and looked, and slowly I perceived that he was drawing nearer to her. Suddenly his eye fell upon the corpse of poor Ustane, and he shuddered and stood still.
“How can I?” he said hoarsely. “Thou art a murderess; she loved me.”
Observe, he was already forgetting that he had loved her.
“It is nothing,” Ayesha murmured, and her voice sounded sweet as the night-wind passing through the trees. “It is naught at all. If I have sinned, let my beauty answer for my sin. If I have sinned, it is for love of thee: let my sin, therefore, be put away and forgotten;” and once more she stretched out her arms and whispered “Come.” Then in a few seconds it was over.
I saw him struggle—I saw him even turn to fly; but her eyes drew him more strongly than iron bonds, and the magic of her beauty and concentrated will and passion entered into him and overpowered him—ay, even there, in the presence of the body of the woman who had loved him well enough to die for him. It sounds horrible and wicked indeed, but he should not be too greatly blamed, and be sure his sin has found him out. The temptress who drew him into evil was more than human, and her beauty was greater than the loveliness of the daughters of men.
I looked up again, and now her perfect form lay in his arms, and her lips were pressed against his own; and thus, with the corpse of his dead love for an altar, did Leo Vincey plight his troth to her red-handed murderess—plight it for ever and a day. For those who sell themselves into a like dominion, paying down the price of their own honour, and throwing their soul into the balance to sink the scale to the level of their lusts, must win deliverance hardly. As they have sown, so shall they reap and reap, even when the poppy flowers of passion have withered in their hands, and their harvest is but bitter tares, garnered in satiety.
Suddenly, with a snake-like motion, she seemed to slip from his embrace, and again she broke out into her low laugh of triumphant mockery, and said, pointing to the dead Ustane:
“Did I not tell thee that within a little space thou wouldst creep to my knee, O Kallikrates? Surely the space has been no great one!”
Leo groaned in shame and misery; for though he was overcome and stricken down, he was not so lost as to be unaware of the depth of the degradation to which he had sunk. On the contrary, his better nature rose up in arms against his fallen self, as I was to learn that night.
20.1 “Come!”
Ayesha laughed a third time, then, veiling herself quickly, she made a sign to the mute, who had been watching the strange scene with curious startled eyes. The girl left, and returned presently, followed by two male mutes, to whom the Queen made another sign. Thereon they all three seized the body of poor Ustane by the arms, dragging it heavily down the cavern and away through the curtains at the end. Leo watched it for a little while, then he covered his face with his hand. To my excited fancy, the glazing eyes of dead Ustane also seemed to watch us as they went.
“There passes the dead past,” said Ayesha, solemnly, as the curtains shook and fell back into their places, when the ghastly procession had vanished behind them. Then, with one of those wild changes of mood of which I have already spoken, again she threw off her veil, and, after the ancient and poetic fashion of the dwellers in Arabia,* broke into a pæan of triumph, or epithalamium, that, rich and beautiful as it was, is most difficult to render into English; that ought, indeed, to be sung to music rather than written and read. It was divided into two parts—one descriptive, the other personal; and, as nearly as I can remember, it ran as follows:—
Love is like a flower in the desert.
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 about 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 is done.
There is only one perfect flower in the wilderness of Life.
That flower is Love!
There is only one fixed light in the mists of our wandering.
That light 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 whence that star rose, or the horizon where it shall set.
Then, turning to Leo, and laying her hand upon his shoulder, Ayesha went on in a fuller and more triumphant tone, speaking in balanced sentences that gradually grew and swelled from romantic prose into pure and majestic verse:—
Long have I loved thee, O 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 has 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 our 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, unfortunately, I am only able to give the burden, I fear but feebly. Then she said:
“Perchance thou dost not believe my word, Kallikrates—perchance thou thinkest that I do delude thee, that I have not lived these many years, and that thou hast not been born again to me. Nay, look not thus—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 sound of thine 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 withi
n 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 ceased awhile, and presently continued, “Stay; if thy heart is yet hardened against the mighty truth, and thou seekest some outward pledge of that which thou dost find too strange to understand, even now it shall be given to thee, and to thee also, O my Holly. Take a lamp each one of you, and follow after me whither I shall lead you.”
Without pausing to think—indeed, speaking for myself, I had almost abandoned the attempt in circumstances which seemed to render it futile, since thought fell hourly helpless against a black wall of wonder—we took the lamps and followed her. Gliding to the end of her chamber, Ayesha 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 this 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 inches. Now, the other steps that I had seen in the caves were quite unworn, as might be expected, since 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 the 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 each small object on its surface starts into an unnatural prominence.
At the foot of the stairway I halted, and stared at the worn steps, and Ayesha, turning, saw me.
“Dost thou wonder whose are the feet that have worn away this rock, my Holly?” she asked. “They are mine—even my own light feet! I can remember when yonder stairs were new and level, but for two thousand years and more have I passed hither day by day, and see, my sandals have eaten out the solid stone!”
I made no answer, but I do not think that anything which I had heard or seen brought home to my limited understanding so clear a sense of this being’s overwhelming antiquity as the sight of this hard granite hollowed out by her soft feet. How many hundreds of thousands of times must she have glided up and down that stair to bring about such a result?
The steps led to a tunnel, and a few paces from its mouth opened a curtain-hung doorway, a glance at which told me that it was the same whence I had witnessed that terrible scene by the leaping flame. I recognised the pattern of the curtain, and the sight of it brought that dread 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.
*Among the ancient Arabians the power of poetic declamation, either in verse or prose, was held in the highest honour and esteem, and he who excelled in it was known as “Khâteb,” or Orator. Every year a general assembly was held, at which the rival poets repeated their compositions, and, so soon as the knowledge of the art of writing became general, those poems which were judged to be the best were inscribed on silk in letters of gold, and publicly exhibited, being known as “Al Modhahabât,” or “golden verses.” In the chant given above by Mr. Holly, Ayesha evidently followed the traditional poetic manner of her people, which was to embody their thoughts in a series of somewhat disconnected sentences, each remarkable for its beauty and the grace of its expression.—EDITOR.
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 hollow in the floor, where I had seen the obedient leaping flame, but now the fire was out. They fell upon the white form stretched there beneath its wrappings upon a bed of stone, upon the fretted carving of the tomb, and upon another shelf of stone opposite to the one on which the body lay, and separated from it only by the breadth of the cave.
“Here,” went on Ayesha, resting 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 I have slept in his cold company—till, as thou seest, this thick slab, like the stairs down which we came, 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, my lord, thou shalt see a wondrous 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 scene was so awful and so solemn. Ayesha advanced, and laid her hand upon the corner of the shroud. Then once more she spoke.
“Be not affrighted,” she said; “though the thing seem wonderful to thee—all we who live have thus lived before; nor are the very shapes that hold us strangers 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, O 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 summon forth 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.
21.1 “Behold!”
“Behold now, let the Dead and Living meet! Across the gulf of Time they still are one. Time has 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 down 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 rest shall roll away as thunderclouds before the wind; the frozen voices 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 cliff of the innumerable years.
“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 shrank back terrified; since, say what she might, the sight was an uncanny one—for her explanations were beyond the grasp of our finite minds, and when stripped from the mists of vague esoteric philosophy, and brought into conflict with cold and horrifying fact, they did not do much to break its force. For, stretched upon the stone bier before us, robed in white and perfectly preserved, was what appeared to be the body of Leo Vincey. I stared from Leo, standing there alive, to Leo lying there dead, and could see no difference between them; except, perhaps, that the body on the bier looked older. Feature for feature they were the same, yes, to the crop of little golden curls, which was Leo’s most uncommon beauty. It even seemed to me, as I looked, that the expression on the dead man’s face resembled that which I had sometimes seen upon Leo’s when he was plunged in profound sleep. I can only sum up the closeness of the resemblance by saying that I never saw twins so exactly similar in appearance as were that dead and living pair.
I turned to see what effect was produced upon Leo by the sight of his dead self, and found it to be that of partial stupefaction. He stood for two or three minutes staring in silence, and when at last he spoke it was only to ejaculate—
“Cover it up, and take me away.”
“Nay, wait, Kallikrates,” said Ayesha, who resembled an inspired Sibyl rather than a woman, as she stood, the lamp raised above her head flooding with i
ts light her own rich beauty and the cold wonder of the death-clothed form upon the bier, and rolled out her majestic sentences with a grandeur and a freedom of utterance which, alas! I cannot render.
“Wait. I would show thee something, that no tittle of my crime may be hidden from thee. Do thou, O Holly, open the garment on the breast of the dead Kallikrates, for perchance my lord may fear to touch his perished self.”
I obeyed with trembling fingers. It seemed a desecration and an unhallowed thing to handle that sleeping image of the living man at my side. Presently the cold breast was bare, and there upon it, over the heart, appeared a wound, evidently inflicted with a spear or dagger.
“Thou seest, Kallikrates,” she said. “Know, then, that it was I who slew thee: in the place of Life I gave thee death. I slew thee because of the Egyptian Amenartas, whom thou didst love, for by her wiles she held thy heart, and her I could not smite as but now I smote yon woman, for she was too strong for me. In my haste and bitter anger I slew thee, and now for all these ages I have lamented thee, and waited for thy coming. And thou hast come, and naught can stand between thee and me, and of a truth now for death I will give thee life—not life eternal, for that none can give, but days and youth that shall endure for thousands upon thousands of years, and with them pomp, and power, and wealth, and all things that are good and beautiful, such as have been to no man before thee, nor shall be to any man who comes after. But one thing more, and thou shalt rest and make ready for the day of thy new birth. Thou seest this body, which was thine own. For all these centuries it hath been my cold comfort and my companion; now I need it no more, for I have thy living presence, and it can but serve to stir up memories of that which I would fain forget. Therefore let it go back to the dust whence I have held it.