The Mystics.

by Katherine Cecil Thurston.

CHAPTER I

Of all the sensations to which the human mind is a prey, there is none so powerful in its finality, so chilling in its sense of an impending event as the knowledge that Death--grim, implacable Death--has cast his shadow on a life that custom and circ.u.mstance have rendered familiar.

Whatever the personal feeling may be--whether dismay, despair, or relief--no man or woman can watch that advancing shadow without a quailing at the heart, an individual shrinking from the terrible, natural mystery that we must all face in turn--each for himself and each alone.

In a gaunt house on the loneliest point where the Scottish coast overlooks the Irish Sea, John Henderson was watching his uncle die. In the plain, whitewashed room where the sick man lay, a fire was burning and a couple of oil-lamps shed an uncertain glow; but outside, the wind roared inland from the sh.o.r.e, and the rain splashed in furious showers against the windows of the house. It was a night of tumult and darkness; but neither the old man who lay waiting for the end nor the young man who watched that end approaching gave any heed to the turmoil of the elements. Each was self-engrossed.

Except for an occasional rasping cough, or a slow, indrawn breath, no sign came from the small iron bedstead on which the dying man lay. His hard, emaciated face was set in an impenetrable mask; his glazed eyes were fixed immovably on a distant portion of the ceiling; and his hands lay clasped upon his breast, covering some object that depended from his neck.

He had lain thus since the doctor from the neighboring town had braved the rising storm and ridden over to see him in the fall of the evening; and no accentuation of the gale that lashed the house, no increase in the roar of the ocean three hundred yards away, had power to interrupt his lethargy.

In curious contrast was the expression that marked his nephew's face. An extraordinary suppressed energy was visible in every line of John Henderson's body as he sat crouching over the fire; and a look of irrepressible excitement smoldered in the eyes that gazed into the glowing coals. He was barely twenty-three years old, but the self-control that comes from endurance and privation sat unmistakably on his knitted brows and closed lips. He was neither handsome of feature nor graceful of figure, yet there was something more striking and interesting than either grace or beauty in the strong, youthful form and the strong, intelligent face. For a long time he retained his crouching seat on the wooden stool that stood before the hearth; then at last the activity at work within his mind made further inaction intolerable. He rose and turned towards the bed.

The dying man lay motionless, awaiting the final summons with that aloofness that suggests a spirit already partially extricated from its covering of flesh. His gla.s.sy eyes were still fixed and immovable save for an occasional twitching of the eyelids; his pallid lips were drawn back from his strong, prominent teeth; and the skin about his temples looked shrivelled and sallow. The doctor's parting words came sharply to the younger man's mind.

"Sit still and watch him--you can do no more."

He reiterated this injunction many times mentally as he stood contemplating the man who for seven interminable years had ruled, repressed, and worked him as he might have worked a well-constructed, manageable machine; and a sudden rush of joy, of freedom and recompense flooded his heart and set his pulses throbbing. He momentarily lost sight of the grim shadow hovering over the house. The sense of emanc.i.p.ation rose tumultuously, over-ruling even the immense solemnity of approaching Death.

John Henderson had known little of the easy, pleasant paths of life, carpeted by wealth and sheltered by influence. His most childish and distant recollections carried him back to days of anxious poverty. His father, the elder son of a wealthy Scottish landowner, had quarrelled with his father, and at the age of twenty left his home, disinherited in favor of his younger brother.

Possessed of a peculiar temperament--pa.s.sionate, headstrong, dogged in his resolves, he had shaken the dust of Scotland from his feet; sworn never to be beholden to either father or brother for the fraction of a penny, and had gone out into the world to seek his fortune. But the fortune had been far to seek. For years he had followed the sea; for years he had toiled on land; but in every undertaking failure stalked him. Finally, at the age of fifty, he touched success for the first time. He fell in love and found his love returned. But here again the irony of fate was constant in its pursuit. The object of his choice was the daughter of an artist, a man as needy, as entirely unfortunate as he himself.

But love at fifty is sometimes as blind as love at twenty-five. With an improvidence that belied his nationality, Alick Henderson married after a courtship as brief as it was happy. For a year he shared the hap-hazard life of his wife and father-in-law; then Nature saw fit to alter the small _menage_. The artist died, and almost at the same time little John was born.

With the coming of the child, Henderson conceived a new impetus and also a new sense of bitterness and self-reproach. A homeless failure may tramp the face of the earth and feel no shame; but the unsuccessful man who is a husband and a father moves upon a different plane. He has ties--responsibilities--something for which he must answer to himself.

There is pathos in the picture of a man setting forth at fifty-one to conquer the world anew; and its grim futility is not good to look upon.

Henderson had failed for himself, and he failed equally for others. The years that followed his marriage were but the unwinding of a pitifully old story. Before his boy was ten years old he had run the gamut of humiliation; he had done everything that the pinch of poverty could demand, except apply for aid to his brother Andrew. This even the faithful, patient wife who had stood stanch in all his trials never dared to suggest.

In this atmosphere John learned to look upon life. A naturally high-spirited and courageous child, he gradually fell under that spell of premature understanding that is the portion of a mind forced too soon to realize the significance of ways and means. Day by day his serious eyes grew to comprehend the lines that marked his mother's beloved face; to know the cost at which his own education, his own wants, were supplied by the tired, silent father, who, despite his shabby clothes and prematurely broken air, seemed perpetually to move in the glamour of a past romance; and gradually, steadily, pa.s.sionately, as these things came home to him, there grew up in his youthful mind a desire to compensate by his own future for the struggle he daily witnessed.

Many were the nights when--his lessons for the next day finished, and his father away at one of the many precarious tasks that kept the household together--he would draw close to his mother, as she sat industriously sewing, and beg her for the hundredth time to recount the story of the grim Scotch home where his father had lost his birthright; of the stern old grandfather who had died inexorably unforgiving; of the unknown uncle of whom rumor told many eccentric stories. And, roused by the recital, his boyish face would flush, his boyish mind leap forward towards the future.

"'Twill all come back, mother!" he would cry. "'Twill all come back!

I'll win it back!"

And, with a sobbing laugh, his mother would drop her sewing and draw him to her heart in a sudden yearning of love and pride.

In such surroundings and in such an atmosphere he pa.s.sed sixteen years; then the first upheaval of his life took place. His father died.

His first recollection--when the terrible necessities of the event were past, and his own grief and consternation had partially subsided--was the remembrance of his mother calling him to her room; of her kissing him, crying over him and telling him of the resolve she had taken to write and make known his existence to his uncle in Scotland.

The confession at first overwhelmed him. His own pride, his sense of loyalty to his father's memory prompted him to cry out against the idea as against a sacrilege. Then slowly his boyish, immature mind grasped something of the n.o.bility that prompted the decision--something of the inexpressible love that counted sentiment and personal dignity as nothing beside his own future; and in a pa.s.sion of grat.i.tude he flung his arms about his mother, repeating the old childish vows with a new and deeper force.

So the letter to Scotland was despatched; and a time of sharp suspense followed for mother and son. Then, one never-to-be-forgotten day, the answer arrived.

Andrew Henderson wrote unemotionally. He expressed formal regret for his brother's death, but evinced no interest in his sister-in-law's position. He briefly described himself as living an isolated life in a small house on the sea-coast, a dozen miles from the family home which had remained untenanted since his father's death. He admitted that with advancing years the duties of life had begun to weigh upon him, diverting his mind and time from the graver pursuits to which his life was devoted; finally he grudgingly suggested that, should his nephew care to undertake the duties of secretary at a salary of sixty pounds a year, he might find a home with him.

The immediate feeling that followed the reading of the letter was fraught with chilling disappointment. On the moment, pride again a.s.serted itself, urging a swift refusal of the rich man's proposal; then once more the patience that had kept Mrs. Henderson brave and gentle during seventeen years of wearing poverty made itself felt. All thought of personal grievance faded from her mind as she pointed out the urgent necessity of John's being seen and known by this uncle, whose only relation and ostensible heir he was. She talked for long, wisely and kindly--as mothers talk out of the unselfish fulness of their hearts--and with every word the golden castles of her imagination rose tower on tower to form the citadel in which her son was to reign supreme.

So wisely and so lovingly did she talk that she persuaded not only the boy, but herself, into the belief that he had but to reach Scotland to make his inheritance sure; and before the day closed she wrote to Andrew Henderson accepting his offer. A week later the whole light of her life went out, as she watched the train steam out of the station, carrying John northward.

Upon the days that followed his arrival in Scotland there is no need to dwell. He came as a stranger, and as a stranger he was introduced by his uncle to the routine of work expected of him. No mention was made of his recent loss, no suggestion was given that his mother should make her double bereavement easier by visits to her son. Whatever of hope or sentiment he had brought with him, he was left to destroy or smother as best he could.

The first week resolved itself into one round of boyish homesickness and desolation; then gradually, as the marvellous healing properties of youth began to stir, a new feeling awakened in his mind--a sense of curiosity concerning the strange old man whom fate, by a twist of the wheel, had made the arbiter of his life. Even to one so young and inexperienced, it was impossible to know Andrew Henderson and not to feel that some strange peculiarity set him apart from other men. In his ascetic face, in his large, light-blue eyes, in his extraordinary air of abstraction and aloofness from mundane things, there was something that fascinated and repelled; and with a wondering interest the boy studied these things, trying in his unformed way to reconcile them with his narrow experience of human nature.

For many weeks he sought without success for some key to the att.i.tude of this new-found relative. Then one evening--when solution seemed least near--the key, metaphorically speaking, fell at his feet. Returning home from a ramble over the headland, his observant eye was caught by the sight of a narrow foot-track that, crossing the main pathway of the cliff, wound steeply upward and seemingly lost itself in a tangle of gorse and bracken. Stirred by a boyish desire for exploration, he paused, turned into this obscure track, and incontinently began its ascent.

For some hundreds of yards it led upward in a sharp incline; and with its added steepness, the ardor of the explorer warmed. With impetuous haste he climbed the last dozen yards; when, as the antic.i.p.ated summit was reached, he halted in abrupt, dismayed surprise; for with alarming suddenness the land broke off short, disclosing a deep gap or fissure, carpeted with heather and surrounded by natural protecting walls of rock, in the centre of which was set a miniature chapel built of dark stone.

At sight of the little edifice, he thrilled with adventurous surprise.

There was something mysterious, something almost fine in the sight of the small temple, with the setting sun gleaming on its solid walls, its low, ma.s.sive door and round window of thick stained gla.s.s. He leaned out over the shelving rock, staring down upon it with wide, astonished eyes; then the natural instinct of the boy overtopped every other feeling.

With a quick-movement of excitement and expectation, he began to descend into the hollow.

But though he walked round the little building a dozen times, shook the heavy door and peered ineffectually into the opaque window, nothing rewarded his curiosity, and after half an hour of diligent endeavor he was compelled to return home no wiser than when he had first stood on the summit of the path and looked down into the rocky cleft.

All that evening, however, the thought of his discovery remained with him. At the eight-o'clock supper of porridge, vegetables, and fruit which he shared with his uncle, he chafed under the silence of his companion and at the air of calm indifference that the whitewashed room with its raftered ceiling seemed to wear; and it was with a sigh of satisfaction that he rose from table and bade his uncle a formal good-night.

With the same suggestion of relief, he watched the old man light his candle and ascend the bare stairs to his own room; then prompted by the impulse he never neglected, he went into the study to write the daily letter that made his mother's existence bearable.

He wrote for nearly an hour, omitting no detail of the evening's discovery. Then, as he closed and sealed the letter, a clock on the mantel-piece struck ten. The sound had an oddly hollow and chilly effect in the bare, carpetless room; and unconsciously he raised his head and glanced about him. His ideas, still stirred by his adventure, were more p.r.o.ne than usual to the suggestion of outward things; and for almost the first time since his arrival, he felt drawn to study his intimate surroundings. With a new curiosity he let his eyes wander from the severe book-shelves to the ugly iron safe that stood in the most prominent position in the room; and from the safe his glance turned to the revolving bookcase by his uncle's favorite chair, in which lay the volumes that were in daily use. Following an impulse he had never previously been conscious of, he crossed the room, and drawing three books, at hap-hazard from the case, studied their t.i.tles.

_The Indissoluble Essence_, he read; _The Soul in Relation to the Human Mind_; _The Mystic Influence_.

He stood for a s.p.a.ce gazing at the sombre covers, but making no attempt to dip into their pages; then a sudden look of comprehension sprang into his eyes. The oddly built stone chapel took on a new and more personal meaning. With a quick gesture he thrust the books back into their place, extinguished the lamp, and softly left the room. Gaining the hall, he did not turn towards the stairs; but tiptoeing to the table, picked up his cap, crossed the hall noiselessly and opened the outer door.

The warmth of the August day was still heavy on the air as he stepped into the open; a great copper-colored moon hung low over the sea, and a soft, filmy haze lay over both land and water. Without hesitation he turned into the cliff path, and followed it until his quick eyes caught the indistinct foot-track that he had discovered earlier in the evening.

With the same decision, the same suggestion of antic.i.p.ation, he stepped rapidly forward and once more began the sharp ascent.

The impetus of his curiosity carried him forward; he mounted the path in hot haste; then, as he gained the summit, he halted again, but in new surprise. In the hazy, mellow moonlight, the small building stood out sharp and dark as on his previous visit, but from the round, stained-gla.s.s window a flood of light--crimson, rose-color, and gold--poured out into the night.

CHAPTER II

In the first moment of astonishment, John stood motionless, his gaze riveted on the glow of color that poured through the window upon the rocks and heather of the cleft. Then, as he continued to stand with widely opened eyes, another surprise was sprung upon him. The door of the chapel opened and the figure of his uncle--long since supposed to be sleeping tranquilly in his own room--showed tall and angular in the aperture.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THE FIGURE OF HIS UNCLE ... SHOWED TALL AND ANGULAR IN THE APERTURE"]

From John's position, the open door and the lighted interior of the little edifice were distinctly visible; and in one glance he saw his uncle's silhouetted figure and behind it a bare s.p.a.ce some dozen feet square, lined on floor and walls with sections of marble alternately black and white. From the ceiling of this chamber depended an octagonal symbol in polished metal, and close by the door eight wax candles flickered slightly in the faint stir of air. But his astonished and inquisitive eyes had barely become aware of these details when Andrew Henderson turned towards the circular sconce in which the candles were set and began to extinguish them one by one. As the light died, he stepped forward and John drew back sharply; but at his movement a stone, loosened by his heel, went rolling down into the hollow. And a moment later his uncle, glancing up, saw his figure outlined against the luminous sky.

What the outcome of the incident would have been on any other occasion, it is difficult to say. As it was, the moment was propitious. Old Henderson, surprised in an instant of exaltation, was pleased to put his own narrow, superst.i.tious construction on the boy's appearance. Laboring under an abnormal excitement, he showed no resentment at the fact of being spied upon; but calling John to him, ordered him to walk home beside him across the cliff.