Alwyn sighed. "Nay, well, for us both,--for I should have chafed at her loving restraint, and she would unquestionably have been disappointed in me. My father was a conscientious, methodical business man, who spent all his days up to almost the last moment of his life in ama.s.sing money, though it never gave him any joy so far as I could see, and when at his death I became sole possessor of his hardly-earned fortune, I felt far more sorrow than satisfaction. I wished he had spent his gold on himself and left me poor, for it seemed to me I had need of nothing save the little I earned by my pen--I was content to live an anchorite and dine off a crust for the sake of the divine Muse I worshipped.

Fate, however, willed it otherwise,--and though I scarcely cared for the wealth I inherited, it gave me at least one blessing--that of perfect independence. I was free to follow my own chosen vocation, and for a brief wondering while I deemed myself happy, ... happy as Keats must have been when the fragment of 'Hyperion' broke from his frail life as thunder breaks from a summer-cloud. I was as a monarch swaying a sceptre that commanded both earth and heaven; a kingdom was mine-a kingdom of golden ether, peopled with shining shapes Protean,--alas!

its gates are shut upon me now, and I shall enter it no more!"

"'No more' is a long time, my friend!" interposed Heliobas gently. "You are too despondent,--perchance too diffident, concerning your own ability."

"Ability!" and he laughed wearily. "I have none,--I am as weak and inapt as an untaught child--the music of my heart is silenced! Yet there is nothing I would not do to regain the ravishment of the past--when the sight of the sunset across the hills, or the moon's silver transfiguration of the sea filled me with deep and indescribable ecstasy--when the thought of Love, like a full chord struck from a magic harp, set my pulses throbbing with delirious delight--fancies thick as leaves in summer crowded my brain--Earth was a round charm hung on the breast of a smiling Divinity--men were G.o.ds--women were angels'--the world seemed but a wide scroll for the signatures of poets, and mine, I swore, should be clearly written!"

He paused, as though ashamed of his own fervor, and glanced at Heliobas, who, leaning a little forward in his chair was regaling him with friendly, attentive interest; then he continued more calmly:

"Enough! I think I had something in me then,--something that was new and wild and, though it may seem self praise to say so, full of that witching glamour we name Inspiration; but whatever that something was, call it genius, a trick of song, what you will,--it was soon crushed out of me. The world is fond of slaying its singing buds and devouring them for daily fare--one rough pressure of finger and thumb on the little melodious throats, and they are mute forever. So I found, when at last in mingled pride, hope, and fear I published my poems, seeking for them no other recompense save fair hearing and justice. They obtained neither--they were tossed carelessly by a few critics from hand to hand, jeered at for a while, and finally flung back to me as lies--lies all! The finely spun web of any fancy,--the delicate interwoven intricacies of thought,--these were torn to shreds with as little compunction as idle children feel when destroying for their own cruel sport the velvety wonder of a moth's wing, or the radiant rose and emerald pinions of a dragon-fly. I was a fool--so I was told with many a languid sneer and stale jest--to talk of hidden mysteries in the whisper of the wind and the dash of the waves--such sounds were but common cause and effect. The stars were merely conglomerated ma.s.ses of heated vapor condensed by the work of ages into meteorites and from meteorites into worlds--and these went on rolling in their appointed orbits, for what reason n.o.body knew, but then n.o.body cared! And Love--the key-note of the theme to which I had set my mistaken life in tune--Love was only a graceful word used to politely define the low but very general sentiment of coa.r.s.e animal attraction--in short, poetry such as mine was altogether absurd and out of date when confronted with the facts of every-day existence--facts which plainly taught us that man's chief business here below was simply to live, breed, and die--the life of a silk-worm or caterpillar on a slightly higher platform of ability; beyond this--nothing!"

"Nothing?" murmured Heliobas, in a tone of suggestive inquiry--"really nothing?"

"Nothing!" repeated Alwyn, with an air of resigned hopelessness; "for I learned that, according to the results arrived at by the most advanced thinkers of the day, there was no G.o.d, no Soul, no Hereafter--the loftiest efforts of the highest heaven--aspiring minds were doomed to end in non-fruition, failure, and annihilation. Among all the desperately hard truths that came rattling down upon me like a shower of stones, I think this was the crowning one that killed whatever genius I had. I use the word 'genius' foolishly--though, after all, genius itself is nothing to boast of, since it is only a morbid and unhealthy condition of the intellectual faculties, or at least was demonstrated to me as such by a scientific friend of my own who, seeing I was miserable, took great pains to make me more so if possible. He proved,--to his own satisfaction if not altogether to mine,--that the abnormal position of certain molecules in the brain produced an eccentricity or peculiar bias in one direction which, practically viewed, might be described as an intelligent form of monomania, but which most people chose to term 'genius,' and that from a purely scientific standpoint it was evident that the poets, painters, musicians, sculptors, and all the widely renowned 'great ones' of the earth should be cla.s.sified as so many brains more or less affected by abnormal molecular formation, which strictly speaking amounted to brain-deformity. He a.s.sured me, that to the properly balanced, healthily organized brain of the human animal, genius was an impossibility--it was a malady as unnatural as rare. 'And it is singular, very singular,' he added with a complacent smile, 'that the world should owe all its finest art and literature merely to a few varieties of molecular disease!' I thought it singular enough, too,--however, I did not care to argue with him; I only felt that if the illness of genius had at any time affected ME, it was pretty well certain I should now suffer no more from its delicious pangs and honey-sweet fever. I was cured! The probing-knife of the world's cynicism had found its way to the musically throbbing centre of divine disquietude in my brain, and had there cut down the growth of fair imaginations for ever. I thrust aside the bright illusions that had once been my gladness; I forced myself to look with unflinching eyes at the wide waste of universal Nothingness revealed to me by the rigid positivists and iconoclasts of the century; but my heart died within me; my whole being froze as it were into an icy apathy,--I wrote no more; I doubt whether I shall ever write again. Of a truth, there is nothing to write about. All has been said. The days of the Troubadours are past,--one cannot string canticles of love for men and women whose ruling pa.s.sion is the greed of gold. Yet I have sometimes thought life would be drearier even than it is, were the voices of poets altogether silent; and I wish--yes! I wish I had it in my power to brand my sign-manual on the brazen face of this coldly callous age-brand it deep in those letters of living lire called Fame!"

A look of baffled longing and un gratified ambition came into his musing eyes,-his strong, shapely white hand clenched nervously, as though it grasped some unseen yet perfectly tangible substance. Just then the storm without, which had partially lulled during the last few minutes, began its wrath anew: a glare of lightning blazed against the uncurtained window, and a heavy clap of thunder burst overhead with the sudden crash of an exploding bomb.

"You care for Fame?" asked Ileliobas abruptly, as soon as the terrific uproar had subsided into a distant, dull rumbling mingled with the pattering dash of hail.

"I care for it--yes!" replied Alwyn, and his voice was very low and dreamy. "For though the world is a graveyard, as I have said, full of unmarked tombs, still here and there we find graves, such as Sh.e.l.ley's or Byron's, whereon pale flowers, like sweet suggestions of ever-silenced music, break into continuous bloom. And shall I not win my own death-garland of asphodel?"

There was an indescribable, almost heart-rending pathos in his manner of uttering these last words--a hopelessness of effort and a despairing sense of failure which he himself seemed conscious of, for, meeting the fixed and earnest gaze of Ileliobas, he quickly relapsed into his usual tone of indolent indifference.

"You see," he said, with a forced smile, "my story is not very interesting! No hairbreadth escapes, no thrilling adventures, no love intrigues--nothing but mental misery, for which few people have any sympathy. A child with a cut finger gets more universal commiseration than a man with a tortured brain and breaking heart, yet there can be no quotion as to which is the most intense duel long enduring anguish of the two. However, such as my troubles are I have told you all I have laid bare my 'wound of living'--a wound that throbs and burns, and aches, more intolerably with every p.i.s.sing hour and day--it is not unnatural, I think, that I should seek for a little cessation of suffering; a brief dreaming s.p.a.ce in which to rest for a while, and escape from the deathful Truth--Truth, that like the flaming sword placed east of the fabled garden of Eden, turns ruthlessly every way, keeping us out of the forfeited paradise of imaginative aspiration, which made the men of old time great because they deemed themselves immortal. It was a glorious faith! that strong consciousness, that in the change and upheaval of whole universes the soul of man should forever over-ride disaster! But now that we know ourselves to be of no more importance, relatively speaking, than the animalculae in a drop of stagnant water, what great works can be done, what n.o.ble deeds accomplished, in the face of the declared and proved futility of everything? Still, if you can, as you say, liberate me from this fleshly prison, and give me new sensations and different experiences, why then let me depart with all possible speed, for I am certain I shall find in the storm-swept areas of s.p.a.ce nothing worse than life as lived in this present world. Remember, I am quite incredulous as to your professed power--" he paused and glanced at the white-robed, priestly figure opposite, then added, lightly, "but I am curious to test it all the same. Are you ready to being your spells?--and shall I say the Nunc Dimittis?"

CHAPTER III.

DEPARTURE.

Heliobas was silent--he seemed engaged in deep and anxious thought,--and he kept his steadfast eyes fixed on Alwyn's countenance, as though he sought there the clew to some difficult problem.

"What do you know of the Nunc Dimittis?" he asked at last, with a half-smile. "You might as well say PATER NOSTER,--both canticle and prayer would be equally unmeaning to you! For poet as you are,--or let me say as you WERE,--inasmuch as no atheist was ever a poet at the same time--"

"You are wrong," interrupted Alwyn quickly. "Sh.e.l.ley was an atheist."

"Sh.e.l.ley, my good friend, was NOT an atheist [Footnote: See the last two verses of Adonais]. He strove to be one,--nay, he made pretence to be one,--but throughout his poems we hear the voice of his inner and better self appealing to that Divinity and Eternity which, in spite of the material part of him, he instinctively felt existent in his own being. I repeat, poet as your WERE, and poet as you will be again when the clouds on your mind are cleared,--you present the strange, but not uncommon spectacle of an Immortal Spirit fighting to disprove its own Immortality. In a word, you will not believe in the Soul."

"I cannot!" said Alwyn, with a hopeless gesture.

"Why?"

"Science can give us no positive proof of its existence; it cannot be defined."

"What do you mean by Science?" demanded Heliobas. "The foot of the mountain, at which men now stand, grovelling and uncertain how to climb? or the glittering summit itself which touches G.o.d's throne?"

Alwyn made no answer.

"Tell me," pursued Heliobas, "how do you define the vital principle?

What mysterious agency sets the heart beating and the blood flowing? By the small porter's lantern of to-day's so-called Science, will you fling a light on the dark riddle of an apparently purposeless Universe, and explain to me why we live at all?"

"Evolution," responded Alwyn shortly, "and Necessity."

"Evolution from what?" persisted Heliobas. "From one atom? WHAT atom?

And FROM WHENCE came the atom? And why the NECESSITY of any atom?"

"The human brain reels at such questions!" said Alwyn, vexedly and with impatience. "I cannot answer them--no one can!"

"No one?" Heliobas smiled very tranquilly. "Do not be too sure of that!

And why should the human brain 'reel'?--the sagacious, calculating, clear human brain that never gets tired, or puzzled, or perplexed!--that settles everything in the most practical and common-sense manner, and disposes of G.o.d altogether as an extraneous sort of bargain not wanted in the general economy of our little solar system! Aye, the human brain is a wonderful thing!--and yet by a sharp, well-directed knock with this"--and he took up from the table a paper-knife with a ma.s.sive, silver-mounted, weighty horn-handle--"I could deaden it in such wise that the SOUL could no more hold any communication with it, and it would lie an inert ma.s.s in the cranium, of no more use to its owner than a paralyzed limb."

"You mean to infer that the brain cannot act without the influence of the soul?"

"Precisely! If the hands on the telegraph dial will not respond to the electric battery, the telegram cannot be deciphered. But it would be foolish to deny the existence of the electric battery because the dial is unsatisfactory! In like manner, when, by physical incapacity, or inherited disease, the brain can no longer receive the impressions or electric messages of the Spirit, it is practically useless. Yet the Spirit is there all the same, dumbly waiting for release and another chance of expansion."

"Is this the way you account for idiocy and mania?" asked Alwyn incredulously.

"Most certainly; idiocy and mania always come from man's interference with the laws of health and of nature--never otherwise. The Soul placed within us by the Creator is meant to be fostered by man's unfettered Will; if man chooses to employ that unfettered Will in wrong directions, he has only himself to blame for the disastrous results that follow. You may perhaps ask why G.o.d has thus left our wills unfettered: the answer is simple--that we may serve Him by CHOICE and not by COMPULSION. Among the myriad million worlds that acknowledge His goodness gladly and undoubtingly, why should He seek to force unwilling obedience from us castaways!"

"As we are on this subject," said Alwyn, with a tinge of satire in his tone, "if you grant a G.o.d, and make Him out to be supreme Love, why in the name of His supposed inexhaustible beneficence should we be castaways at all?"

"Because in our overweening pride and egotism we have ELECTED to be such," replied Heliobas. "As angels have fallen, so have we. But we are not altogether castaways now, since this signal," and he touched the cross on his breast, "shone in heaven."

Alwyn shrugged his shoulders disdainfully.

"Pardon me," he murmured coldly, "with every desire to respect your religious scruples, I really cannot, personally speaking, accept the tenets of a worn-out faith, which all the most intellectual minds of the day reject as mere ignorant superst.i.tion. The carpenter's son of Judea was no doubt a very estimable person,--a socialist teacher whose doctrines were very excellent in theory but impossible of practice.

That there was anything divine about Him I utterly deny; and I confess I am surprised that you, a man of evident culture, do not seem to see the hollow absurdity of Christianity as a system of morals and civilization. It is an ever-sprouting seed of discord and hatred between nations; it has served as a casus belli of the most fanatical and merciless character; it is answerable for whole seas of cruel and unnecessary bloodshed ..."

"Have you nothing NEW to say on the subject?" interposed Heliobas, with a slight smile. "I have heard all this so often before, from divers kinds of men both educated and ignorant, who have a willful habit of forgetting all that Christ Himself prophesied concerning His creed of Self-renunciation, so difficult to selfish humanity: 'Think not that I come to send peace on the earth. I come, not to send peace, but a sword.' Again 'Ye shall be hated of all men for my name's sake.' ...

'all ye shall be offended because of me.' Such plain words as these seem utterly thrown away upon this present generation. And do you know I find a curious lack of originality among so-called 'freethinkers'; in fact their thoughts can hardly be designated as 'free' when they all run in such extremely narrow grooves of similitude--a flock of sheep mildly trotting under the guidance of the butcher to the slaughterhouse could not be more tamely alike in their bleating ignorance as to where they are going. Your opinions, for instance, differ scarce a whit from those of the common boor who, reading his penny Radical paper, thinks he can dispense with G.o.d, and talks of the 'carpenter's son of Judea'

with the same easy flippancy and scant reverence as yourself. The 'intellectual minds of the day' to which you allude, are extraordinarily limited of comprehension, and none of them, literary or otherwise, have such a grasp of knowledge as any of these dead and gone authors," and he waved his hand toward the surrounding loaded bookshelves, "who lived centuries ago, and are now, as far as the general public is concerned, forgotten. All the volumes you see here are vellum ma.n.u.scripts copied from the original slabs of baked clay, stone tablets, and engraved sheets of ivory, and among them is an ingenious treatise by one Remeni Adranos, chief astronomer to the then king of Babylonia, setting forth the Atom and Evolution theory with far more clearness and precision than any of your modern professors. All such propositions are old--old as the hills, I a.s.sure you; and these days in which you live are more suggestive of the second childhood of the world than its progressive prime. Especially in your own country the general dotage seems to have reached a sort of climax, for there you have the people actually forgetting, deriding, or denying their greatest men who form the only lasting glories of their history; they have even done their futile best to tarnish the unsoilable fame of Shakespeare. In that land you,--who, according to your own showing, started for the race of life full of high hopes and inspiration to still higher endeavor--you have been, poisoned by the tainted atmosphere of Atheism which is slowly and insidiously spreading itself through all ranks, particularly among the upper cla.s.ses, who, while becoming every day more lax in their morals and more dissolute of behavior, consider themselves far too wise and 'highly cultured' to believe in anything. It is a most unwholesome atmosphere, charged with the morbidities and microbes of national disease and downfall; it is difficult to breathe it without becoming fever-smitten; and in your denial of the divinity of Christ, I do not blame you any more than I would blame a poor creature struck down by a plague. You have caught the negative, agnostic, and atheistical infection from others,--it is not the natural, healthy condition of your temperament."

"On the contrary it IS, so far as that point goes," said Alwyn with sudden heat--"I tell you I am amazed,--utterly amazed, that you, with your intelligence, should uphold such a barbaric idea as the Divinity of Christ! Human reason revolts at it,--and after all, make as light of it as you will, reason is the only thing that exalts us a little above the level of the beasts."

"Nay--the beasts share the gift of reason in common with us," replied Heliobas, "and Man only proves his ignorance if he denies the fact.

Often indeed the very insects show superior reasoning ability to ourselves, any thoroughly capable naturalist would bear me out in this a.s.sertion."

"Well, well!" and Alwyn grew impatient--"reason or no reason, I again repeat that the legend on which Christianity is founded is absurd and preposterous,--why, if there were a grain of truth in it, Judas Iscariot instead of being universally condemned, ought to be honored and canonized as the first of saints!"

"Must I remind you of your early lesson days?" asked Heliobas mildly.

"You will find it written in a Book you appear to have forgotten, that Christ expressly prophesied, 'Woe to that man' by whom He was betrayed.

I tell, you, little as you credit it, there is not a word that the Sinless One uttered while on this earth, that has not been or shall not be in time fulfilled. But I do not wish to enter into any controversies with you; you have told me your story,--I have heard it with interest,--and I may add with sympathy. You are a poet, struck dumb by Materialism because you lacked strength to resist the shock,--you would fain recover your singing-speech--and this is in truth the reason why you have come to me. You think that if you could gain some of the strange experiences which others have had while under my influence, you might win back your lost inspiration--though you do not know WHY you think this--neither do I--I can only guess."

"And your guess is...?" demanded Alwyn with an air of affected indifference.