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The Redemption of David Corson

by Charles Frederic Goss · English · Gutenberg #14730 · 586,562 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Redemption of David Corson

Author: Charles Frederic Goss


        
Release date: January 19, 2005 [eBook #14730]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE REDEMPTION OF DAVID CORSON ***

THE REDEMPTION OF DAVID CORSON

by

CHARLES FREDERIC GOSS

The Bowen-Merrill Company

1900







_To my friend
William Harvey Anderson_




Contents

     I.  This Other Eden
    II.  And Satan Came Also
   III.  The Egyptians
    IV.  The Woman
     V.  The Light That Lies
    VI.  The Trail of the Serpent
   VII.  The Chance Word
  VIII.  A Broken Reed
    IX.  Where Paths Converge
     X.  A Poisoned Spring
    XI.  The Flesh and the Devil
   XII.  The Moth and the Flame
  XIII.  Found Wanting
   XIV.  Turned Tempter
    XV.  The Snare of the Fowler
   XVI.  The Derelicts
  XVII.  The Shadow of Death
 XVIII.  A Fugitive and a Vagabond
   XIX.  Alienation
    XX.  The Inevitable Hour
   XXI.  A Signal in the Night
  XXII.  Heart Hunger
 XXIII.  Where I Might Find Him
  XXIV.  Safe Haven
   XXV.  The Little Lad
  XXVI.  Out of the Shadow
 XXVII.  If Thine Enemy Hunger
XXVIII.  A Man Crossed With Adversity
  XXIX.  As a Tale That is Told
   XXX.  Out of the Jaws of Death
  XXXI.  The Great Refusal
 XXXII.  The End of Exile
XXXIII.  A Self-imposed Expiation
 XXXIV.  Fasting in the Wilderness
  XXXV.  A Forest Idyl
 XXXVI.  The Supreme Test
XXXVII.  Paradise Regained





CHAPTER I.

THIS OTHER EDEN

     "This other Eden, demi-paradise, this fortress built by nature."
     --Richard II.

Hidden away in this worn and care-encumbered world, scarred with its
frequent traces of a primeval curse, are spots so quiet and beautiful as
to make the fall of man seem incredible, and awaken in the breast of the
weary traveler who comes suddenly upon them, a vague and dear delusion
that he has stumbled into Paradise.

Such an Eden existed in the extreme western part of Ohio in the spring
of eighteen hundred and forty-nine. It was a valley surrounded by wooded
hills and threaded by a noisy brook which hastily made its way, as if
upon some errand of immense importance, down to the big Miami not many
miles distant. A road cut through a vast and solemn forest led into the
valley, and entering as if by a corridor and through the open portal of
a temple, the traveler saw a white farm-house nestling beneath a mighty
hackberry tree whose wide-reaching arms sheltered it from summer sun
and winter wind. A deep, wide lawn of bluegrass lay in front, and a
garden of flowers, fragrant and brilliant, on its southern side.
Stretching away into the background was the farm newly carved out of the
wilderness, but already in a high state of cultivation. All those
influences which stir the deepest emotion of the heart were silently
operating here--quiet, order, beauty, power, life. It affected one to
enter it unprepared in much the same way, only with a greater variety
and richness of emotion, as to push through dense brush and suddenly
behold a mountain lake upon whose bosom there is not so much as a
ripple, and in whose silver mirror surrounding forests, flying
water-fowl and the bright disk of the sun are perfectly reflected.

In this lovely valley, at the close of a long, odorous, sun-drenched day
in early May, the sacred silence was broken by a raucous blast from that
most unmusical of instruments, a tin dinner horn. It was blown by a
bare-legged country boy who seemed to take delight in this profanation.
By his side, in the vine-clad porch of the white farm-house stood a
woman who shaded her eyes with her hand as she looked toward a vague
object in a distant meadow. She was no longer young, but had exchanged
the exquisite beauty of youth for the finer and more impressive beauty
of maturity. As the light of the setting sun fell full upon her face it
seemed almost transparent, and even the unobserving must have perceived
that some deep experience of the sadness of life had added to her
character an indescribable charm.

"Thee will have to go and call him, Stephen, for I think he has fallen
into another trance," the woman said, in a low voice in which there was
not a trace of impatience, although the evening meal was waiting and the
pressing work of the household had been long delayed.

The child threw down his dinner horn, whistled to his dog and started.
Springing up from where he had been watching every expression of his
master's face, the shaggy collie bounded around him as he moved across
the lawn, while the woman watched them with a proud and happy smile.
They had scarcely entered the long lane leading to the pasture, when a
woodchuck shambled out of the corner of the fence and ran lumbering into
his burrow. Rushing excitedly after him the child clapped his hands and
shouted: "Dig him out! Dig him out, Shep!" Tearing up the ground with
his paws and thrusting his head down into the subterranean chamber, the
obedient collie yelped and whined. Then backing out and plunging in once
more, he yelped and whined again. The hole was too deep or the time too
short and the boy became discouraged. Moving reluctantly away he
chidingly summoned his companion to follow him. The dog, humiliated by
his failure, obeyed, and sheepishly licked his mouth with his long, red
tongue.

By this time the sun's disk had sunk behind the hills, its trailing
glory lingering above their summits while slowly in the sky faded
continents, mountains and spires. The day had died regretfully upon a
couch o'erhung with gorgeous canopies, and the ensanguined bier still
seemed to tremble with his last sigh. Birds in the tops of trees and
crickets beneath the sod were giving expression to the emotions of the
sad heart of the great earth in melancholy evening songs. The odors of
peach and apple blossoms, wafted by gentle breezes from distant
orchards, made the valley fragrant as an oriental garden. The soothing
influence of the approaching night subdued the effervescent spirits of
the lad, and he began to walk softly, as do nuns in the aisles of dim
cathedrals or deer in the pathways of the moonlit forest. These few
moments between twilight and dark are pregnant with a mysterious
holiness and it is doubtful if the worst of men could find the courage
to commit a crime while they endure.

Unutterable and incomprehensible emotions were awakened in the soul of
the boy by the stillness and beauty of the evening world. His senses
were not yet dulled nor his feelings jaded. Through every avenue of his
intelligence the mystery of the universe stole into his sensitive
spirit. If a breeze blew across the meadow he turned his cheek to its
kiss; if the odor of spearmint from the brookside was wafted around him
he breathed it into his nostrils with delight. He saw the shadow of a
crow flying across the field and stopped to look up and listen for the
swish of her wings and her loud, hoarse caw as she made her way to the
nesting grounds; then he gazed beyond her, into the fathomless depths of
the blue sky, and his soul was stirred with an indescribable awe.
Everything filled him with surprise, with wonder and with ecstasy,--the
glowing sky above the western hills, the new pale crescent of the silver
moon, the heavy-laden honey bees eagerly hastening home, the long
shadows lying across his path, the trees with branches swaying in the
evening breeze, the cows with bursting udders lowing at the bars.

But it was not so much the objects themselves as the spirit pervading
them, which stirred the depths of the child's mind. The little pantheist
saw God everywhere. We bestow the gift of language upon a child, but the
feelings which that language serves only to interpret and express exist
and glow within him even if he be dumb. And this gift of language is
often of questionable value, and had been so with him. Things he had
heard said about God often made the boy hate Him. All that he felt,
filled him with love. To him the valley was heaven, and through it
invisibly but unmistakably God walked, morning, noon and evening.

To the child sauntering dreamily and wistfully along, the object dimly
seen from the farm-house door began gradually to dissolve itself into a
group of living beings. Two horses were attached to a plow; one standing
in the lush grass of the meadow, and the other in a deep furrow traced
across its surface. The first, an old gray mare, was breathing heavily,
her sides expanding and contracting like a bellows. Her wide nostrils
opened and closed with spasmodic motions. Her eyes were shut and she
seemed to be asleep. The other, a young and slender filly doing this
season the first real service of her life, pawed the ground restlessly,
snorted, shook her mane, rattled the harness chains and looked angrily
over her shoulder at the driver. The plowshare was buried deep in the
rich, alluvial soil, and a ribbon of earth rolled from its blade like a
petrified sea billow, crested with a cluster of daisies white as the
foam of a wave.

Between the handles of the plow and leaning on the crossbar, his back to
the horses, stood a young Quaker. His broad-brimmed hat, set carelessly
on the back of his head, disclosed a wide, high forehead; his flannel
shirt, open at the throat, exposed a strong, columnar neck, and a deep,
broad chest; his sunburned and muscular arms were folded across his
breast; figure and posture revealed the perfect concord of body and soul
with the beauty of the world; his great blue eyes were fixed upon the
notch in the hills where the sun had just disappeared; he gazed without
seeing and felt without thinking.

The boy approached this statuesque figure with a stealthy tread, and
plucking a long spear of grass tickled the bronzed neck. The hand of the
plowman moved automatically upward as if to brush away a fly, and at
this unconscious action the child, seized by a convulsion of laughter
and fearing lest it explode, stuffed his fists into his mouth. In the
opinion of this irreverent young skeptic his Uncle Dave was in a
"tantrum" instead of a "trance," and he thought such a disease demanded
heroic treatment.

For several years this Quaker youth had been the subject of remarkable
emotional experiences, in explanation of which the rude wits of the
village declared that he had been moon-struck; the young girls who
adored his beauty thought he was in love, and the venerable fathers and
mothers of this religious community believed that in him the scriptural
prophecy, "Your young men shall see visions," had been literally
fulfilled. David Corson himself accepted the last explanation with
unquestioning faith. He no more doubted the existence of a spiritual
than of a material universe. He did not even conceive of their having
well-defined boundaries, but seemed to himself to pass from one to the
other as easily as across the lines of adjoining farms. In this respect
he resembled many a normal youth, except that this impression had
lingered with him a little longer than was usual; for faith is always
instinctive, while skepticism is the result of experience and
reflection. Having as yet only wandered around the edges of the sacred
groves of wisdom where these pitiless teachers break the sweet shackles
of their pupils, he still thought the thoughts of childhood and
instinctively obeyed the injunction of Emerson, to "reverence the dreams
of our youth," and the admonition of Richter, that "when we cease to do
so, then dies the man in us." Whatever might have been the real nature
of these emotional experiences, no one doubted that they possessed a
genuine reality of some kind or other, for it was a matter of history in
this little community that David Corson had often exercised prophetic,
mesmeric and therapeutic powers.

The life of this young man had been pure and uneventful. Existence in
this frontier region, once full of the tragedy of Indian warfare, had
been gradually softened by peace and religion. The passions slowly
kindling in the struggle over slavery had not yet burst into flame, and
this particular valley was even more quiet than others because it had
been settled by a colony of Quakers. Into it the rude noises of the
great outside world floated only in softened echoes, and what knowledge
young Corson had acquired of that vague and shadowy realm had come
mainly through traveling preachers, and this, because of their
simplicity and unworldliness, was not unlike hearing the crash of arms
through silken portieres or seeing the flash of lightning through the
stained-glass windows of a cathedral. In such a sequestered region books
and papers were scarce, and he had access only to a few volumes written
by quietists and mystics, and to that great mine of sacred literature,
the Holy Bible. The seeds of knowledge sown by these books in the rich
soil of this young heart were fertilized by the society of noble men,
virtuous women, and natural surroundings of exquisite beauty.

But however limited his knowledge of men and affairs, the young mystic
had acquired an extraordinary familiarity with the operations of the
divine life which animates the universe. He seemed to have found the
pass-key to nature's mysteries, and to have acquired a language by which
he could communicate with all her creatures. He knew where the rabbits
burrowed, where the partridges nested, and where the wild bees stored
their honey. He could foretell storms by a thousand signs, possessed the
homing instinct of the pigeons, knew where the first violets were to be
found, and where the last golden-rod would bloom. The squirrels crept
down the trunks of trees to nibble the crumbs which he scattered for
them. He could fold up his hands like a cup and at his whistle birds
would drop into them as into a nest. His was a beautiful soul, and what
Novalis said of Spinoza might have been said of him, "he was a
God-intoxicated man." He was in that blissful period of existence when
the interpretations of life imparted to him by his elders solved the few
simple problems of thought and action pressed upon him by his
environment. He had never seriously questioned any of the ideas received
from his instructors. He was often conscious of the infinite mystery
lying beyond his ken, but never of those frightful inconsistencies and
contradictions in nature and life by which the soul is sooner or later
paralyzed or at least bewildered.

And so his outlook upon the universe was serene and untroubled. As he
stood there in the deepening twilight he differed from the child who had
approached him in this, that while the boy reveled in the beauty around
him because he did not try to comprehend it, the youth was intoxicated
by the belief that he possessed the clue to all these mysteries, and had
a working theory of all the phenomena in the natural and spiritual world
in which he moved. To such mystical natures this confidence is
unavoidable anywhere through the period of the pride of adolescence; but
it was heightened in this case by the simplicity of life's problems in
this narrow valley, and in the provincial little village which was the
metropolis of this sparsely settled region. To him "the cackle of that
bourg was the murmur of the world," and his theories of a life lacking
the complexities of larger aggregations of men seemed adequate, because
he had never seen them thoroughly tested, to meet every emergency
arising for reflection or endeavor. In this mental attitude of serene
and undisturbed confidence that he knew the real meaning of existence,
and was in constant contact with the divine mind through knowledge or
through vision, every avenue of his spirit was open to the influences of
nature. Through all that gorgeous day of May he had been drawing these
influences into his being as the vegetation drew in light and moisture,
until his soul was drenched through and through, and at that perfect
hour of dusk, when the flowers and grasses exhaled the gifts they had
received from heaven and earth in a richer, finer perfume like an
evening oblation, the young dreamer was also rendering back those gifts
bestowed by heaven in an incense of purest thought and aspiration. It
was one of those hours that come occasionally in that sublime period of
unshattered ideals and unsullied faith, for which Pharaoh and Cæsar
would have exchanged their thrones, Croesus and Lucullus bartered their
wealth, Solomon and Aristotle forgotten their learning.

Every imaginative youth who has been reared in pure surroundings
experiences over again in these rare and radiant hours all the bliss
that Adam knew in Eden. To his joyous, eager spirit, the world appears a
new creation fresh from the hand of God. He hears its author walking in
the garden at eventide, and murmuring: "Behold it is very good." A
single element of disquietude, a solitary, vague unrest disturbs him. He
awaits his Eve with longing, but has no dread of the serpent.

At sight of this young man the most superficial observer would have
paused to take a second look; an artist would have instinctively seized
his pencil or his brush; a scientist would have paused to inquire what
mysterious influences could have produced so finely proportioned a
nature; a philosopher to wonder what would become of him in some sudden
and powerful temptation.

None of these reflections disturbed the mind of the barefooted boy.
Having suppressed his laughter, he tickled the sunburnt neck again. Once
more the hand rose automatically, and once more the boy was almost
strangled with delight. The dreamer was hard to awaken, but his
tormentor had not yet exhausted his resources. No genuine boy is ever
without that fundamental necessity of childhood, a pin, and finding one
somewhere about his clothing, he thrust it into the leg of the plowman.
The sudden sting brought the soaring saint from heaven to earth. In an
instant the mystic was a man, and a strong one, too. He seized the
unsanctified young reprobate with one hand and hoisted him at arm's
length above his head.

"Oh, Uncle Dave, I'll never do it again! Never! Never! Let me down."

Still holding him aloft as a hunter would hold a falcon, the
reincarnated "spirit" laughed long, loud and merrily, the echoes of his
laughter ringing up the valley like a peal from a chime of bells. The
child's fear was needless, for the heart and hands that dealt with him
were as gentle as a woman's. The youth, resembling some old Norse god as
he stood there in the gathering gloom, lowered the child slowly, and
printing a kiss on his cheek, said:

"Thee little pest, thee has no reverence! Thee should never disturb a
child at his play, a bird on his nest nor a man at his prayers."

"But thee was not praying, Uncle Dave," the boy replied. "Thee was only
in another of thy tantrums. The supper has grown cold, the horses are
tired and Shep and I have walked a mile to call thee. Grandmother said
thee had a trance. Tell me what thee has seen in thy visions, Uncle
Dave?"

"God and His angels," said the young mystic softly, falling again into
the mood from which he had been so rudely awakened.

"Angels!" scoffed the young materialist. "If thee was thinking of any
angel at all, I will bet thee it was Dorothy Fraser."

"Tush, child, do not be silly," replied the convicted culprit. For it
was easier than he would care to admit to mingle visions of beauty with
those of holiness.

"I am not silly. Thee would not dare say thee was not thinking of her.
She thinks of thee."

"How does thee know?"

"Because she gives me bread and jam if I so much as mention thy name."

This did not offend the young plowman, to judge by the expression of his
face; but he said nothing, and, stooping down, loosened the chains of
the whiffletree and turned the faces of the tired horses homeward. The
cavalcade moved on in silence for a few moments, but nothing can repress
the chatter of a boy, and presently he began again.

"Uncle Dave, was it really up this very valley that Mad Anthony Wayne
marched with his brave soldiers?"

"This very valley."

"I wish I could have been with him."

"It is an evil wish. Thee is a child of peace. Thy father and thy
father's fathers have denied the right of men to war. Thee ought to be
like them, and love the things that make for peace."

"Well, if I can not wish for war, I will wish that a runaway slave would
dash up this valley with a pack of bloodhounds at his heels. Oh, Uncle
Dave, tell me that story about thy hiding a negro in the haystack, and
choking the bloodhounds with thine own hands."

"I have told thee a hundred times."

"But I want to hear it again."

"Use thy memory and thy imagination."

"Oh, no, please tell me. I like to hear some one tell something."

"Thee does? Then listen to the whip-poor-will, the cricket or the
brook."

"I hear them, but I do not know what they say. Tell me."

"Tell thee! No one can tell thee, child, if thee can not understand for
thyself. The message differs for the hearers, and the difference is in
the ear and not the sound."

They both paused for a moment, and listened to those soothing lullabies
with which nature sings the world to sleep. So powerful was the tide
that floated the mystic out on the ocean of dreams, he would have
drifted away again if the child had not suddenly recalled him.

"I can not make out what they say," he cried, "and anyhow there is no
time to try. Come, let us go. Everybody is waiting for us."

"Thee is right," answered his uncle. "Go and let down the bars and we
will hurry home."

The child, bounding forward, did as he was told, and the tired
procession entered the barnyard. The plowman fed his horses, and stopped
to listen for a moment to their deep-drawn sighs of contentment, and to
the musical grinding of the oats in their teeth. His imaginative mind
read his own thoughts into everything, and he believed that he could
distinguish in these inarticulate sounds the words, "Good-night.
Good-night."

"Good-night," he said, and stroking their great flanks with his kind
hand, left them to their well-earned repose. On his way to the house he
stopped to bathe his face in the waters of a spring brook that ran
across the yard, and then entered the kitchen where supper was spread.

"Thee is late," said the woman who had watched and waited, her fine face
radiant with a smile of love and welcome.

"Forgive me, mother," he replied. "I have had another vision."

"I thought as much. Thee must remember what thee has seen, my son," she
said, "for all that thee beholds with the outer eye shall pass away,
while what thee sees with the inner eye abides forever. And had thee a
message, too?"

"It was delivered to me that on the holy Sabbath day I should go to the
camp in Baxter's clearing and preach to the lumbermen."

"Then thee must go, my son."

"I will," he answered, taking her hand affectionately, but with Quaker
restraint, and leading her to the table.

The family, consisting of the mother, an adopted daughter Dorothea, the
daughter's husband Jacob and son Stephen, sat down to a simple but
bountiful supper, during which and late into the evening the young
mystic pondered the vision which he believed himself to have seen, and
the message which he believed himself to have heard. In his musings
there was not a tremor or a doubt; he would have as soon questioned the
reality of the old farm-house and the faces of the family gathered about
the table. Of the susceptibility of the nerves to morbid activity, or
the powers of the overdriven brain to objectify its concepts, he had
never even dreamed. He was a credulous and unsophisticated youth,
dwelling in a realm of imagination rather than in a world of reality and
law. He had much to learn. His education was about to begin, and to
begin as does all true and effective education, in a spiritual
temptation. The Ghebers say that when their great prophet Ahriman was
thrown into the fire by the order of Nimrod, the flames into which he
fell turned into a bed of roses, upon which he peacefully reclined. This
innocent Quaker youth had been reclining upon a bed of roses which now
began to turn into a couch of flames.




CHAPTER II.

AND SATAN CAME ALSO

     "It is the little rift within the lute
     That by and by will make the music mute,
     And ever widening slowly silence all."

     --Tennyson.


At the moment when Stephen was sounding the horn to summon the young
mystic to his supper, a promiscuous crowd of loafers with chairs tilted
against the wall of the village tavern received a shock.

They heard the tinkle of bells in the distance, and looking in the
direction of this unusual sound, saw a team of splendid coal-black
horses dash round a corner and whirl a strange vehicle to the door of
the inn.

There were two extraordinary figures on the front seat of the wagon. The
driver was a sturdy, thick-set man whose remarkable personal appearance
was fixed instantly and ineradicably in the mind of the beholder by an
enormous moustache whose shape, size and color suggested a crow with
outstretched wings. As if to emphasize the ferocious aspect lent him by
this hairy canopy which completely concealed his mouth, Nature had
duplicated it in miniature by brows meeting above his nose and spreading
themselves, plume-like, over a pair of eyes which gleamed so brightly
that they could be felt, altho' they were so deep-set that they could
scarcely be seen.

This fierce and buccaneerish person summoned the dozing hostler in a
coarse, imperative voice, flung him the reins, sprang from his seat, and
assisted his companion to alight. She gave him her hand with an air of
utter indifference, bestowed upon him neither smile nor thanks, and
dropped to the ground with a light flutter like a bird. Turning
instantly toward the tavern, she ascended the steps of the porch under a
fusillade of glances of astonishment and admiration. Young and
beautiful, dressed in a picturesque and brilliant Spanish costume, she
carried herself with the ease and dignity of a princess, and looked
straight past, or rather through the staring crowd, fastened like
inverted brackets to the tavern wall. Her great, dreamy eyes did not
seem to note them.

When she and her companion had entered the hall and closed the door
behind them, every tilted chair came down to the floor with a bang, and
many voices exclaimed in concert, "Who the devil is she?" Curiosity was
satisfied at eight o'clock in the evening, for at that hour Doctor
Paracelsus Aesculapius, as he fantastically called himself, opened the
doors of his traveling apothecary shop and exposed his "universal
panacea" for sale, while at the same time, "Pepeeta, the Queen of
Fortune Tellers," entered her booth and spread out upon a table the
paraphernalia by which she undertook to discover the secrets of the
future.

When the evening's work was ended, Pepeeta at once retired; but the
doctor entered the bar-room, followed by a curious and admiring crowd.
He was in a happy and expansive frame of mind, for he had done a "land
office" business in this frontier village which he was now for the first
time visiting.

"Have a drink, b-b-boys?" he asked, looking over the crowd with an air
of superiority and waving his hand with an inclusive gesture. The motley
throng of loafers sidled up to the bar with a deprecatory and automatic
movement. They took their glasses, clinked them, nodded to their
entertainer, muttered incoherent toasts and drank his health. The
delighted landlord, feeling it incumbent upon him to break the silence,
offered the friendly observation: "S-s-see you s-s-stutter. S-s-stutter
a little m-m-my own self."

"Shake!" responded the doctor, who was in too complacent a mood to take
offence, and the worthies grasped hands.

"Don't know any w-w-way to s-s-stop it, do you?" asked the landlord.

"No, I d-d-don't; t-t-tried everything. Even my 'universal p-p-panacea'
won't do it, and what that can't do can't be d-d-done. Incurable
d-d-disease. Get along all right when I go slow like this; but when I
open the throttle, get all b-b-balled up. Bad thing for my business.
Give any man a thousand d-d-dollars that'll cure me," the quack replied,
slapping his trousers pocket as if there were millions in it.

"Co-co-couldn't go q-q-quite as high as that; but wouldn't mind a
hu-hu-hundred," responded the landlord cordially.

"Ever hear the story about the landlord's troubles in the Mexican war?"
asked one of the by-standers turning to the quack.

"Tell it," he responded laconically.

Several members of the group looked at each other and exchanged
significant winks as the narrator began his tale.

"They made him sergeant of a company, but had to reduce him to the
ranks, because when he was drilling the boys one day they all marched
into the river and got drowned before he could say h-h-halt."

The doctor laughed and the others joined him out of courtesy, for the
story was worn threadbare in the bar-room.

"Tell about his going on picket duty," suggested some one.

"Captain ordered him out on the line," said the first speaker, "and he
refused. 'T-t-tain't no use,' says he.

"'Why not?' says the captain.

"'C-c-cause,' says he, 'if some d-d-dirty Mexican g-g-greaser should
c-c-come along, he'd run me through the g-g-gizzard before I could ask
him for the c-c-countersign.'"

More tipsy laughter followed.

"Tell you what it is, b-b-boys," said the quack, growing communicative
under the influence of the liquor and the fellowship, "if it wasn't for
this b-b-blankety-blanketed impediment in my s-s-speech, I wouldn't
need to work more'n about another y-y-year!"

"How's that?" asked someone in the crowd.

"C-c-cause if I could talk as well as I c-c-can think, I could make a
fortune 'side of which old John Jacob Astor's would look like a
p-p-penny savings b-b-bank!"

"You could?"

"You bet your sweet life I c-c-could. And I'm just keeping my eyes open
for some young f-f-fellow to help me. For 'f I can find a man that can
do the t-talking (I mean real talk, you know; talk a crowd blind as
b-b-bats), I've got something better'n a California g-g-gold mine."

"Better get Dave Corson," said the village wag from the rear of the
crowd, and up went a wild shout of laughter.

"Who's D-D-Dave Corson?" asked the doctor.

"Quaker preacher. Young feller 'bout twenty years old."

"Can he t-t-talk?"

"Talk! He kin talk a mule into a trottin' hoss in less'n three minutes."

"He's my man!" exclaimed the doctor, at which the crowd laughed again.

"What the d-d-deuce are you laughing at?" he asked, turning upon them
savagely, his loud voice and threatening manner frightening those who
stood nearest, so that they instinctively stepped back a pace or two.

"No offence, Doc," said one of them; "but you couldn't get him."

"Couldn't get him! Why couldn't I g-g-get him?"

"He's pious."

"Pious! What do _I_ care?"

"Well, these here pious Quakers are stiff in their notions. But you kin
jedge fer yourself 'bout his talkin', fer there's goin' ter be an
appinted Quaker meetin' to-morrow night, and he'll speak. You kin go an'
listen, if you want to."

"I'll be there, boys, and d-d-don't you forget it. I'll hook him! Never
saw anything I couldn't buy if I had a little of the p-p-proper stuff
about me. Drink to my l-l-luck, boys, and watch me!"

The landlord filled their glasses once more, and low gurglings,
smothered swallows, and loud smacking of lips filled the interim of
interrupted conversation.

"I say, Doc, that daughter of yours knows her biz when it comes to
telling fortunes," ventured a young dandy, whose head had been turned by
Pepeeta's beauty.

"D-d-daughter!" snapped the quack, turning sharply upon him; "she's not
my daughter, she's my wife!"

"Wife! Gosh! You don't say?" exclaimed the crestfallen dandy.

"Yes, wife! And I'll j-j-just warn any of you young f-f-fellers that if
I catch you trying to p-p-plow with my heifer, you'll be food for
buzzards before sun-up!"

He swept his eyes savagely round the circle as he spoke, and the subject
dropped.

The conversation turned into other channels, and flowed in a maudlin,
sluggish manner far into the night. Every member of the bibulous party
was as happy as he knew how to be. The landlord's till was full of
money, the loafers were full of liquor, and the doctor's heart was full
of vanity and trust in himself.




CHAPTER III.

THE EGYPTIANS

     "Steal! to be sure they may; and egad, serve your best thoughts as
     gypsies do stolen children,--disfigure them to make them pass for
     their own."

     --Sheridan.


In order to comprehend the relationship of this strangely mated pair, we
must go back five or six years to a certain day when this same Doctor
Aesculapius rode slowly down the main street of a small city in Western
Pennsylvania, and then out along a rugged country highway. A couple of
miles brought him to the camp of a band of gypsies.

A thin column of smoke ascending from a fire which seemed almost too
lazy to burn, curled slowly into the air.

Around this campfire was a picturesque group of persons, all of whom,
with a single exception, vanished like a covey of quail at the approach
of the stranger. The man who stood his ground was a truly sinister
being. He was tall, thin and angular; his clothing was scant and ragged,
his face bronzed with exposure to the sun. A thin moustache of
straggling hairs served rather to exaggerate than to conceal the vicious
expression of a hare-lipped mouth. He stood with his elbow in the palm
of one hand and his chin in the other, while around his legs a pack of
wolf-like dogs crawled and growled as the traveler drew near. Throwing
himself lightly to the ground the intruder kicked the curs who sprang
at him, and as the terrified pack went howling into the door of the
tent, said cheerily.

"Good-morning, Baltasar."

The gypsy acknowledged his salutation with a frown.

"I wish to sell this horse," the traveler added, without appearing to
notice his cold reception.

The gypsy swept his eye over the animal and shook his head.

"If you will not buy, perhaps you will trade," the traveler said.

"Come," was the laconic response, and so saying, the gypsy turned
towards the forest which lay just beyond the camp. The "doctor" obeyed,
and the dogs sneaked after him, still growling, but keeping a respectful
distance. A moment later he found himself in a sequestered spot where
there was an improvised stable; and a dozen or more horses glancing up
from their feed whinnied a welcome.

"Look zem over," said the gypsy, again putting his elbow in his left
hand and his chin in his right--a posture into which he always fell when
in repose.

The quack, moving among the animals with an easy, familiarity, glanced
them over quickly but carefully, and shook his head.

"What!" exclaimed the gypsy with well feigned surprise; "ze señor doez
not zee ze horse he wanz?"

"Horses!" exclaimed the quack; "these are not horses. These are
boneyards. Every one of them is as much worse than mine as mine is than
the black stallion you stole in Pittsburg on the twenty-first day of
last October."

"Worze zan yourz! It eez impozzeeble!" answered the gypsy, as if he had
not heard the accusation. "Ziz horze ov yourz eez what you call a
crow-zcare! Zhe eez two hunner year ol'. Her teeth are fell oud. Zhe haz
ze zpavins. Zhe haz ze ringa bonze. But, señor," growing suddenly
respectful, and spreading out his hands in open and persuasive gestures,
"ere eez a horze zat eez a horze. Ee knowz more zan a man! Ee gan work
een ze arnez, ee gan work een ze zaddle; ee gan drot; ee can gallop; ee
gan bead ze winz!"

The gypsy had played his part well and concealed with consummate art
whatever surprise he might have felt at the charge of theft. His
attitude was free, his look was bold and his manner full of confidence.

The demeanor of the quack suddenly altered. From that of an easy
nonchalance, it turned to savage determination.

"Baltasar," he said, his face white and hard; "let us stop our acting.
Where is that stallion?"

"Whad ztallion?" asked the imperturbable gypsy, with an expression of
child-like innocence.

"I will not even take time to tell you, but if you do not take me to him
this instant there will be a dead gypsy in these woods," said the quack
fiercely.

"Ze zdranger jesz!" the gypsy answered blandly, showing his teeth and
spreading out the palms of his hands.

The quack reached into his bosom, drew forth a pistol, pointed it at the
right eye of the gypsy, and said: "Look into the mouth of that and tell
me whether you see a bullet lying in its throat!"

"I zink zat ze señor an' heez piztol are boz lying in zeir zroats," he
answered with easy irony.

"Good! But I am not here to match wits with you. I want that horse, and
lie or no lie, I will have it. Take me to it, or I swear I will blow out
your brains as sure as they are made of bacon and baby flesh!"

The gypsy vouchsafed no reply, but turned on his heel and led the way
into the forest.

After a walk of a hundred yards or more they came to a booth of boughs,
through the loose sides of which could be seen a black stallion.

"Lead him out," said the doctor imperatively; and the gypsy obeyed.

The magnificent animal came forth snorting, pawing the ground and
tossing his head in the air.

The eye of the quack kindled, and after regarding the noble creature for
a moment in silent admiration he turned to the gypsy and said,
"Baltasar, do not misunderstand me, I am neither an officer of the law
nor in any other way a minister of justice. I have as few scruples as
you as to how I get a horse; but we differ from each other in this, that
if you were in my place you would take the horse without giving an
equivalent. Now I am a man of mercy, and if you will ask a fair price
you shall have it. But mark me! Do not overreach yourself and kill the
goose that is about to lay the golden egg."

"Wat muz be, muz be," the gypsy answered, shrugging his shoulders as if
in the presence of an inexorable fate, and added: "Ze brice iz zwo
hunner and viftee dollars, wiz ze mare drown een."

Putting his pistol back into his pocket with an air of triumph, the
doctor said: "There seems to be persuasive power in cold lead. Stretch
forth your palm and I will cross it for you."

The gypsy did so, and into that tiger-like paw he counted the golden
coin; at the musical clink of each piece the eye of the gypsy
brightened, and when he closed his hand upon them and thrust them into
his pocket his hair-lip curled with a cynical smile.

The stranger took the bridle and saddle from his mare, placed them on
the stallion and mounted.

As they moved forward through the silent forest the gypsy sang softly to
himself:

     "The Romany chal to his horse did cry
       As he placed the bit in his jaw,
     Kosko gry, Romany gry,
       Muk, man, kuster, tute knaw."

He was still humming this weird tune when they emerged into the open
fields, and there the traveler experienced a surprise.

A little rivulet lay across their path, and up from the margin of it
where she had been gathering water cresses there sprang a young girl,
who cast a startled glance at him, then bounded swiftly toward the tent
and vanished through the opening.

Now it happened that this keen admirer of horses was equally susceptible
to the charms of female beauty, and the loveliness of this young girl
made his blood tingle. In her hand she carried a bunch of cresses still
dripping with the water of the brook. A black bodice was drawn close to
a figure which was just unfolding into womanhood. The color of this
garment formed a striking contrast to a scarlet skirt which fell only a
little below her knees. On her feet were low-cut shoes, fastened with
rude silver buckles. A red kerchief had become untied and let loose a
wave of black hair, which fell over her half bare shoulders. Her face
was oval, her complexion olive, her eyes large, eager and lustrous.

All this the man who admired women even more than he admired horses, saw
in the single instant before the girl dashed toward the tent and
disappeared. So swift an apparition would have bewildered rather than
illumined the mind of an ordinary man. But the quack was not an ordinary
man. He was endowed with a certain rude power of divination which
enabled him to see in a single instant, by swift intuition, more than
the average man discovers by an hour of reasoning. By this natural
clairvoyance he saw at a glance that this face of exquisite delicacy
could no more have been coined in a gypsy camp than a fine cameo could
be cut in an Indian wigwam. He knew that all gypsies were thieves, and
that these were Spanish gypsies. What was more natural than that he
should conclude with inevitable logic that this child had been stolen
from people of good if not of noble blood!

He who had coveted the horse with desire, hungered for the maiden with
passion; and with him, to feel an appetite, was to rush toward its
gratification, as fire rushes upon tow.

"Baltasar!" he said.

The gypsy turned.

"You are a girl-thief as well as a horse-thief."

If the gypsy had felt astonished before, he was now terrified in the
presence of a man who seemed to read his inmost thoughts; and for the
first time in his life acknowledged to himself that he had met his
master in cunning.

Bewildered as he was by this new charge, he still remembered that if
speech was silver, silence was golden, and answered not a word.

"Baltasar," continued the strange man on horseback, rightly judging from
the gypsy's confusion that he had hit the mark and determining to take
another chance shot; "you stole this girl from the family of a Spanish
nobleman. I am the representative of this family and have followed your
trail for years. You thought I had come to get the horse. You were
mistaken; it was the girl!"

"Perdita!" exclaimed the gypsy, taken completely off his guard.

"Lost indeed," responded the quack, scarcely able to conceal his pride
in his own astuteness. And then he added slowly: "She must be a burden
to you, Baltasar. You evidently never have been able or never have dared
to take her back and claim the ransom which you expected. I will pay you
for her and take her from your hands. It is the child I want and not
vengeance."

"Ze Caballero muz be a Duquende (spirit)," gasped the gypsy.

"At any rate I want the child. You were reasonable about the horse. Be
reasonable about her, and all will be well."

"Ze Caballero muz be made of gol'."

The horseman drew a silver coin from his pocket and flipped it into the
waters of the brook.

The gypsy's face gleamed with avarice and springing into the water he
began to scrape among the stones where it had fallen.

The stranger watched him for awhile with an expression of mingled
amusement and contempt, and finally said: "Baltasar, I am in haste. You
can search for that trifle after I am gone. Let us finish our business.
What will you take for the girl?"

Still standing in the water, which he seemed reluctant to leave, he
shrugged his shoulders and replied: "We muz azk Chicarona. Zhe eez my
vife."

"And master?" asked the quack, smiling sardonically.

The gypsy did not answer, but, stepping from the brook and looking
backward, reluctantly led the way to the tent.

"Chicarona! Chicarona!" he cried as they approached it.

The flap of the tent was thrown suddenly backward, and three figures
emerged--a tall and stately woman, a little elfish child; and an old
hag, wrinkled, toothless and bent with the weight of unrecorded years.
The woman was the mother of the little child and the daughter of the old
hag.

"Chicarona," said the gypsy, "ze Gacho az byed ze ztallion for zwo
hunner an' viftee dollars, an' now he wanz to buy Pepeeta."

"Wad vor?" she asked.

"Berhabs he zinkz zhe eez a prinzez, I dunno," he answered, digging the
toe of his bare foot nervously into the sand.

"Zen dell 'im zat he zhold not look vor ztrawberries in ze zea, nor red
herring in ze wood," she said with a look of scorn.

The eyes of the stranger and the gypsy met. They confronted each other
like two savage beasts who have met on a narrow path and are about to
fight for its possession. It was not an unequal match. The man's eyes
regarded the woman with a proud and masterful determination. The woman's
seemed to burn their way into the inmost secrets of the man's soul.

Chicarona was a remarkable character. In her majestic personality, the
virtues and the vices of the Spanish Gypsy fortune-teller were
incarnate. The vices were legion; the virtues were two--the love of
kindred, and physical chastity--the chastity of the soul itself being
unknown.

"We are wasting time gazing at each other like two sheep in a pasture.
Will you sell the girl?" the horseman asked, impatiently.

"I will nod!" she answered, with proud defiance.

"Then I will take her by force!"

"Ah! What could nod ze monkey do, if he were alzo ze lion!"

"I am the lion, and therefore I must have this lamb!"

"Muz? Say muz to ze clouds; to ze winz; to ze lightningz; but not to
Chicarona!"

"If you do not agree to accept a fair offer for this girl, you will be
in jail for kidnapping her in less than one hour!"

At this threat, the brilliant black eyes emitted a shower of angry
sparks, and she exclaimed in derision, "Ze Buzno will dake us do brizon,
ha! ha! ha!"

"Ze Buzno will dake us do brizon, hee! hee! hee!" giggled the little
impish child who tugged at her skirts.

The old woman pressed forward and mumbled, "'Ol' oud your 'an', my
pretty fellow. Crozz ze ol' gypsy's palm, and zhe will dell your
fortune."

With every new refusal, the resolute stranger became still more
determined. "Pearls are not to be had without a plunge," he murmured to
himself, and dismounted.

Throwing the bridle of his horse over the limb of a tree, he approached
the woman with a threatening gesture.

As he did so, the three female figures began to revolve around him in a
circle, pointing their fingers at him and hissing like vipers. As the
old woman passed before his face she threw a handful of snuff in his
eyes--an act which has been, from time immemorial, the female gypsy's
last resort.

Had he been less agile than he was, it would have proved a finishing
stroke, but there are some animals that can never be caught asleep, or
even napping, and he was one. He winked and dodged, and, quicker than a
flash, brought the old crone a sharp cut across her knuckles with his
riding whip.

As he did so, Baltasar sprang at his throat, but he once more drew his
pistol and leveled it at the gypsy's head. His patience had been
exhausted.

"Fool!" he cried, "Bring this woman to reason. This is a wild country,
and a family of gypsies would be missed as little as a litter of blind
puppies! Bring her to reason, I say, or I will murder every one of you!"

Once more shrugging those expressive shoulders which seemed to have a
language of their own, the gypsy said "Chicarona, you do not luf ze
leedle pindarri. Zell 'er to ze Buzno. Ee eez made of gol'."

As Baltasar uttered these words, he approached his wife and whispered
something in her ear at which she started. Turning with a sudden motion
to the stranger, she fixed her piercing eyes upon him and exclaimed,
"You zay you know ze parenz of zis chil'?"

"I do."

"You lie!"

"How, then, did I know that you had stolen her?"

"You guezz zat! Any vool gan guezz zat! I zdole 'er, but who I zdole 'er
vrom, you do not know any more zan you know why ze frogs zdop zinging
when ze light zhines."

"Ah! You did steal her, did you? Why do gypsies steal children when they
have so many of their own, and it is so easy to raise more, Chicarona?"

"Azk ze tiger why it zpringz, or ze lightning why it zdrikes! I will
alzo azk ze Caballero a queztion. What doez he wan' wiz zis leedle
gurrl?"

"To be a father to her!" he answered, with a sly wink at Baltasar.

"Alzo' I am dressed in wool, I am no sheep! Tell me," she cried,
stamping her foot.

"Why should I tell secrets to one who can read the future?" he asked
banteringly.

Chicarona's mood was changing. It was evident from her looks, either
that she was defeated in the contest by this wily and resistless
combatant or that she had succumbed to the temptation of his money.

"How much will you gif vor zis chil'?" she asked.

"One hundred dollars," he replied.

"One hunner dollars! You paid more zan twize as much vor ze horze! Eez
nod a woman worth more zan a horze?"

"She will be, when she is a woman. She is a child now."

"Let me zee ze color of your money!"

He drew a leather wallet from his pocket and held it tantalizingly
before her eyes.

Its influence was decisive upon her avaricious soul, and she clutched at
it wildly.

"Put it into my han'!" she cried.

"Put Pepeeta into mine," he said.

"Pepeeta! Pepeeta!" she called.

"Pepeeta! Pepeeta!" shrilled the old crone.

Out of the door of the tent she came, her eyes fixed upon the ground,
and her fingers picking nervously at the tinsel strings which fastened
her bodice.

"Gif me ze money and take her," said Chicarona.

He counted out the gold, and then approached the child. For the first
time in his life he experienced an emotion of reverence. There was
something about her beauty, her helplessness and his responsibility that
made a new appeal to his heart.

Yielding to the gentle pressure of his hand, she permitted herself to be
led away. Not a goodbye was said. Chicarona's feeling toward her had
been fast developing from jealousy into hatred as the child's beauty
began to increase and attract attention. The others loved her, but dared
not show it. Not a sign of regret was exhibited, except by the old
crone, who approached her, gave her a stealthy caress, and secretly
placed a crumpled parchment in her hand.

The Doctor lifted the child upon the horse's back and climbed into the
saddle. As they turned into the highway, he heard Chicarona say, "Bring
me my pajunda, Baltasar, and I will sing a grachalpa."

The beautiful child trembled, for the words were those of hatred and
triumph. She trembled, but she also wept. She was parting from those
whose lives were base and cruel; but they were the only human beings
that she knew. She was leaving a wagon and a tent, but it was the only
home that she could remember. In a vague and childish way, she felt
herself to be the sport of mysterious powers, a little shuttlecock
between the battledores of Fortune. Whatever her destiny was to be,
there was no use in struggling, and so she sobbed softly and yielded to
the inevitable. Her little hands were folded across her heart in an
instinctive attitude of submission. Folded hands are not always resigned
hands; but Pepeeta's were. She submitted thus quietly not because she
was weak, but because she was strong, not because she was contemptible,
but because she was noble. In proportion to the majesty of things, is
the completeness of their obedience to the powers that are above them.
Gravitation is obeyed less quietly by a grain of dust than by the rivers
and planets. Those half-suppressed sobs and hardly restrained sighs
would have softened a harder heart than that of this young man of thirty
years. He was rude and unscrupulous, but he was not unkind. His breast
was the abiding place of all other passions and it was not strange that
the gentlest of all should reside within it, nor that it should have
been so quickly aroused at the sight of such loveliness and such
helplessness.

To have a fellow-being completely in our power makes us either utterly
cruel or utterly kind, and all that was gentle in that great rough
nature went out in a rush of tenderness toward the little creature who
thus suddenly became absolutely dependent upon his compassion. After
they had ridden a little way, he began in his rough fashion to try to
comfort her.

"Don't cry, Pepeeta! You ought to be thankful that you have got out of
the clutches of those villains. You could not have been worse off, and
you may be a great deal better! They were not always kind to you, were
they? I shouldn't wonder if they beat you sometimes! But you will never
be beaten any more. You shall have a nice little pony, and a cart, and
flowers, and pretty clothes, and everything that little girls like. I
don't know what they are, but whatever they are you shall have them. So
don't cry any more! What a pretty name Pepeeta is! It sounds like music
when I say it. I have got the toughest name in the world myself. It's a
regular jaw-breaker--Doctor Paracelsus Aesculapius! What do you think of
that, Pepeeta! But then you need not call me by the whole of it! You can
just call me Doctor, for short. Now, look at me just once, and give me a
pretty smile. Let me see those big black eyes! No? You don't want to?
Well, that's all right. I won't bother you. But I want you to know that
I love you, and that you are never going to have any more trouble as
long as you live."

These were the kindest words the child had ever had spoken to her, or at
least the kindest she could remember. They fell on her ears like music
and awakened gratitude and love in her heart. She ceased to sigh, and
before the ride to town was ended had begun to feel a vague sense of
happiness.

       *       *       *       *       *

The next few years were full of strange adventures for these singular
companions. The quack had discovered certain clues to the past history
of the child whom he had thus adopted, and was firmly persuaded that she
belonged to a noble family. He had made all his plans to take her to
Spain and establish her identity in the hope of securing a great reward.
But just as he was about to execute this scheme, he was seized by a
disease which prostrated him for many months, and threw him into a
nervous condition in which he contracted the habit of stammering. On his
recovery from his long sickness he found himself stripped of everything
he had accumulated; but his shrewdness and indomitable will remained,
and he soon began to rebuild his shattered fortune.

During all these ups and downs, Pepeeta was his inseparable and devoted
companion. The admiration which her childish beauty excited in his heart
had deepened into affection and finally into love. When she reached the
age of sixteen or seventeen years, he proposed to her the idea of
marriage. She knew nothing of her own heart, and little about life, but
had been accustomed to yield implicit obedience to his will. She
consented and the ceremony was performed by a Justice of the Peace in
the city of Cincinnati, a year or so before their appearance in the
Quaker village. An experience so abnormal would have perverted, if not
destroyed her nature, had it not contained the germs of beauty and
virtue implanted at her birth. They were still dormant, but not dead;
they only awaited the sun and rain of love to quicken them into life.

The quack had coarsened with the passing years, but Pepeeta, withdrawing
into the sanctuary of her soul, living a life of vague dreams and
half-conscious aspirations after something, she knew not what, had grown
even more gentle and submissive. As she did not yet comprehend life, she
did not protest against its injustice or its incongruity. The vulgar
people among whom she lived, the vulgar scenes she saw, passed across
the mirror of her soul without leaving permanent impressions. She
performed the coarse duties of her life in a perfunctory manner. It was
her body and not her soul, her will and not her heart which were
concerned with them. What that soul and that heart really were, remained
to be seen.




CHAPTER IV.

THE WOMAN

     "One woman is fair, yet I am well; another is wise, yet I am well;
     but till all graces be in one woman, one woman shall not come in my
     grace."--Much Ado About Nothing.


True to his determination, the doctor devoted the night following his
advent into the little frontier village to the investigation of the
Quaker preacher's fitness for his use. He took Pepeeta with him, the
older habitues of the tavern standing on the porch and smiling
ironically as they started.

The meeting house was one of those conventional weather-boarded
buildings with which all travelers in the western states are familiar.
The rays of the tallow candles by which it was lighted were streaming
feebly out into the night. The doors were open, and through them were
passing meek-faced, soft-voiced and plain-robed worshipers.

The silhouettes of the men's broad hats and the women's poke bonnets,
seen dimly against the pale light of the windows as they passed, plainly
revealed their sect. The similarity of their garments almost obliterated
the personal identity of the wearers.

The two strangers, so different in manners and dress, joined the
straggling procession which crept slowly along the road and chatted to
each other in undertones.

"What queer people," said Pepeeta.

"Beat the Dutch, and you know who the D-d-dutch beat!"

"What sort of a building is that they are going into?"

"That's a church."

"What is a church for?"

"Ask the marines! Never b-b-been in one more'n once or twice.
G-g-g-guess they use 'em to p-p-pray in. Never pray, so never go."

"Why have you never taken me?"

"Why should I?"

"We go everywhere else, to theaters, to circuses, to races."

"Some sense in going there. Have f-f-fun!"

"Don't they have any fun in churches?"

"Fun! They think a man who laughs will go straight to the b-b-bow-wows!"

"What are they for, then, these churches?"

"For religion, I tell you."

"What is religion?"

"Don't you know?"

"No."

"Your education has been n-n-neglected."

"Tell me what it is!"

"D-d-d-don't ask so many questions! It is something for d-d-dead folks."

"How dark the building looks."

"Like a b-b-barn."

"How solemn the people seem."

"Like h-h-hoot owls."

"It scares me."

"Feel a little b-b-bit shaky myself; but it's too late to b-b-back out
now. I'm going if they roast and eat me. If this f-f-feller can talk as
they say he can, I am going to get hold of him, d-d-d-dead or alive.
I'll have him if it takes a habeas c-c-corpus."

At this point of the conversation they arrived at the meeting-house.
Keeping close together, Pepeeta light and graceful, the doctor heavy and
awkward, both of them thoroughly embarrassed, they ascended the steps as
a bear and gazelle might have walked the gang-plank into the ark. They
entered unobserved save by a few of the younger people who were staring
vacantly about the room, and took their seats on the last bench. The
Quaker maidens who caught sight of Pepeeta were visibly excited and
began to preen themselves as turtle doves might have done if a bird of
paradise had suddenly flashed among them. One of them happened to be
seated next her. She was dressed in quiet drabs and grays. Her face and
person were pervaded and adorned by simplicity, meekness, devotion; and
the contrast between the two was so striking as to render them both
self-conscious and uneasy in each other's presence.

The visitors did not know at all what to expect in this unfamiliar
place, but could not have been astonished or awed by anything else half
so much as by the inexplicable silence which prevailed. If the whole
assemblage had been dancing or turning somersaults, they would not have
been surprised, but the few moments in which they thus sat looking
stupidly at the people and then at each other seemed to them like a
small eternity. Pepeeta's sensitive nature could ill endure such a
strain, and she became nervous.

"Take me away," she imploringly whispered to the doctor, who sat by her
side, ignorant of the custom which separated the sexes.

He tried to encourage her in a few half-suppressed words, took her
trembling hand in his great paw, pressed it reassuringly, winked
humorously, and then looked about him with a sardonic grin.

To Pepeeta's relief, the silence was at last broken by an old man who
rose from his seat, reverently folded his hands, lifted his face to
heaven, closed his eyes and began to speak. She had never until this
moment listened to a prayer, and this address to an invisible Being
wrought in her already agitated mind a confused and exciting effect; but
the prayer was long, and gave her time to recover her self-control. The
silence which followed its close was less painful because less strange
than the other, and she permitted herself to glance about the room and
to wonder what would happen next. Her curiosity was soon satisfied.
David Corson, the young mystic, rose to his feet. He was dressed with
exquisite neatness in that simple garb which lends to a noble person a
peculiar and serious dignity. Standing for a moment before he began his
address, he looked over the audience with the self-possession of an
accomplished orator. The attention of every person in the room was at
once arrested. They all recalled their wandering or preoccupied
thoughts, lifted their bowed heads and fixed their eyes upon the
commanding figure before them.

This general movement caused Pepeeta to turn, and she observed a sudden
transformation on the countenance of the dove-like Quaker maiden. A
flush mantled her pale cheek and a radiance beamed in her mild blue
eyes. It was a tell-tale look, and Pepeeta, who divined its meaning,
smiled sympathetically.

But the first word which fell from the lips of the speaker withdrew her
attention from every other object, for his voice possessed a quality
with which she was entirely unfamiliar. It would have charmed and
fascinated the hearer, even if it had uttered incoherent words. For
Pepeeta, it had another and a more mysterious value. It was the voice of
her destiny, and rang in her soul like a bell. The speech of the young
Quaker was a simple and unadorned message of the love of God to men, and
of their power to respond to the Divine call. The thoughts to which he
gave expression were not original, but simply distillations from the
words of Madam Guyon, Fenelon, Thomas à Kempis and St. John; and yet
they were not mere repetitions, for they were permeated by the freshness
and the beauty of his own pure feelings.

"We are all," said he, "the children of a loving Father whom the heaven
of heavens cannot contain, who yet dwells in every contrite human heart
as the light of the great sun reproduces itself in every drop of dew.
To have God dwell thus in the soul is to enjoy perfect peace. This life
is a life of bitterness to those who struggle against God, a world of
sorrow to those who doubt Him, and of darkness to those who refuse His
sweet illumination. But the sorrow and the struggle end, and the
darkness becomes the dawn to every one who loves and trusts the heavenly
Father, for He bestows upon all a Divine gift. This gift is the 'inner
light,' the light which shines within the soul itself and sheds its rays
upon the dark pathway of existence. This God of love is not far from
every one of us and we may all know Him. He is to be loved, not hated;
trusted, not feared! Why should men tremble at the consciousness of His
presence? Does the little sparrow in its nest feel any fear when it
hears the flutter of its parent's wings? Does the child shudder at its
mother's approaching footsteps?" As he uttered these words, he paused
and awaited an answer.

Each sentence had fallen into the sensitive soul of the Fortune Teller
like a pebble into a deep well. She was gazing at him in astonishment.
Her lips were parted, her eyes were suffused and she was leaning forward
breathlessly.

"If we would live bravely, hopefully, tranquilly," he continued, "we
must be conscious of the presence of God. If we believe with all our
hearts that He knows our inmost thoughts, we shall experience comfort
beyond words. This life of peace, of aspiration, of communion, is
possible to all. The evil in us may be overthrown. We may reproduce the
life of Christ on earth. We may become as He was--one with God. As the
little water drop poured into a large measure of wine seems to lose its
own nature entirely and take on the nature and the color of both the
water and the wine; or as air filled with sunlight is transformed into
the same brightness so that it does not appear to be illuminated by
another light so much as to be luminous of itself; so must all feeling
toward the Holy One be self-dissolved and wholly transformed into the
will of God. For how shall God be all in all, if anything of man remains
in man?"

In words and images like these the young mystic poured forth his soul.
There were no flights of oratory, and only occasional bursts of anything
that could be called eloquence. But in an inexplicable manner it moved
the heart to tenderness and thrilled the deepest feelings of the soul.
Much of the effect on those who understood him was due to the truths he
uttered; but even those who, like the two strangers, were unfamiliar
with the ideas advanced, or indifferent to them, could not escape that
nameless influence with which all true orators are endowed, and were
thrilled by what he said. In our ignorance we have called this influence
by the name of "magnetism." Whatever it may be, this young man possessed
it in a very high degree, and when to it was added his personal beauty,
his sincerity, and his earnestness, it became almost omnipotent over
the emotions, if not over the reason. It enslaved Pepeeta completely.

It was impossible that in so small a room a speaker should be
unconscious of the presence of strangers. David had noticed them at
once, and his glance, after roaming about the room, invariably returned
and fixed itself upon the face of the Fortune Teller. Their fascination
was mutual. They were so drawn to each other by some inscrutable power,
that it would not have been hard to believe that they had existed as
companions in some previous state of being, and had now met and vaguely
remembered each other.

When at length David stopped speaking, it seemed to Pepeeta as if a
sudden end had come to everything; as if rivers had ceased to run and
stars to rise and set. She drew a long, deep breath, sighed and sank
back in her seat, exhausted by the nervous tension to which she had been
subjected.

The effect upon the quack was hardly less remarkable. He, too, had
listened with breathless attention. He tried to analyze and then to
resist this mesmeric power, but gradually succumbed. He felt as if
chained to his seat, and it was only by a great effort that he pulled
himself together, took Pepeeta by the arm and drew her out into the open
air.

For a few moments they walked in silence, and then the doctor exclaimed:
"P-p-peeta, I have found him at last!"

"Found whom?" she asked sharply, irritated by the voice which offered
such a rasping contrast to the one still echoing in her ears.

"Found whom? As if you didn't know! I mean the man of d-d-destiny! He is
a snake charmer, Pepeeta! He just fairly b-b-bamboozled you! I was
laughing in my sleeve and saying to myself, 'He's bamboozled Pepeeta;
but he can't b-b-bamboozle me!' When he up and did it! Tee-totally did
it! And if he can bamboozle me, he can bamboozle anybody."

"Did you understand what he said?" Pepeeta asked.

"Understand? Well, I should say not! The d-d-devil himself couldn't make
head nor tail out of it. But between you and me and the town p-p-pump
it's all the better, for if he can fool the people with that kind of
g-g-gibberish, he can certainly f-f-fool them with the Balm of the
B-B-Blessed Islands! First time I was ever b-b-bamboozled in my life.
Feels queer. Our fortune's made, P-p-pepeeta!"

His triumph and excitement were so great that he did not notice the
silence and abstraction of his wife. His ardent mind invariably
excavated a channel into which it poured its thoughts, digging its bed
so deep as to flow on unconscious of everything else. Exulting in the
prospect of attaching to himself a companion so gifted, never doubting
for a moment that he could do so, reveling in the dreams of wealth to be
gathered from the increased sales of his patent medicine, he entered the
hotel and made straight for the bar-room, where he told his story with
the most unbounded delight.

Pepeeta retired at once to her room, but her mind was too much excited
and her heart too much agitated for slumber. She moved restlessly about
for a long time and then sat down at the open window and looked into the
night. For the first time in her life, the mystery of existence really
dawned upon her. She gazed with a new awe at the starry sky. She thought
of that Being of whom David had spoken. Questions which had never before
occurred to her knocked at the door of her mind and imperatively
demanded an answer. "Who am I? Whence did I come? For what was I
created? Whither am I going?" she asked herself again and again with
profound astonishment at the newness of these questions and her
inability to answer them.

For a long time she sat in the light of the moon, and reflected on these
mysteries with all the power of her untutored mind. But that power was
soon exhausted, and vague, chaotic, abstract conceptions gave place to a
definite image which had been eternally impressed upon her inward eyes.
It was the figure of the young Quaker, idealized by the imagination of
an ardent and emotional woman whose heart had been thrilled for the
first time.

She began timidly to ask herself what was the meaning of those feelings
which this stranger had awakened in her bosom. She knew that they were
different from those which her husband inspired; but how different, she
did not know. They filled her with a sort of ecstasy, and she gave
herself up to them. Exhausted at last by these vivid thoughts and
emotions, she rested her head upon her arms across the window sill and
fell asleep. It must have been that the young Quaker followed her into
the land of dreams, for when her husband aroused her at midnight a faint
flush could be seen by the light of the moon on those rounded cheeks.

There are all the elements of a tragedy in the heart of a woman who has
never felt the emotions of religion or of love until she is married!




CHAPTER V.

THE LIGHT THAT LIES

     "Oh! why did God create at last
     This novelty on earth, this fair defect
     Of nature, and not till the world at once
     With men as angels, without feminine?"

     --Paradise Lost.


On the following morning the preacher-plowman was afield at break of
day. The horses, refreshed and rested by food and sleep, dragged the
gleaming plowshare through the heavy sod as if it were light snow, and
the farmer exulted behind them.

That universal life which coursed through all the various forms of being
around him, bounded in tides through his own veins. The fresh morning
air, the tender light of dawning day, the odors of plants and songs of
birds, filled his sensitive soul with unutterable delight.

In the midst of all these beauties and wonders, he existed without
self-consciousness and labored without effort. His heart was pure and
his oneness with the natural world was complete. Whatever was beautiful
and gentle in the manifold operations of the Divine Spirit in the world
around him, he saw and felt. To all that was horrible and ferocious, he
was blind as a child in Paradise. He did not notice the hawk sweeping
upon the dove, the swallow darting upon the moth, nor the lizard lying
in wait for the fly; or, if he did, he saw them only as he saw the
shadows flitting across the sunny landscape. His soul was like a garden
full of light, life, perfume, color and the music of singing birds and
whispering leaves. Before his inward eye the familiar figures of his
daily life passed and repassed, but among them was also a new one. It
was the figure that had arrested his attention and inspired him the
night before.

For hours he followed the plow without the consciousness of fatigue, but
at length he paused to rest the horses, who were beginning to pant with
their hard labor. He threw back his head, drew in deep inspirations of
pure air, glanced about and felt the full tide of the simple joy of
existence roll over him. Life had never seemed sweeter than in those few
moments in which he quaffed the brimming cup of youth and health which
nature held to his lips. Not a fear, not an apprehension of any danger
crossed his soul. His glances roved here and there, pausing a moment in
their flight like hummingbirds, to sip the sweetness from some unusually
beautiful cloud or tree or flower, when he suddenly caught sight of a
curious equipage flying swiftly down the road at the other side of the
field. The spirited horses stopped. A man rose from the seat, put his
hands to his mouth like a trumpet, uttered a loud "hallo," and beckoned.

David tied the reins to the plow handles and strode across the fresh
furrows. Vaulting the fence and leaping the brook which formed the
boundary line of the farm, he ascended the bank and approached the
carriage. As he did so the occupants got out and came to meet him. To
his astonishment he saw the strangers whom he had noticed the night
before. The man advanced with a bold, free demeanor, the woman timidly
and with downcast eyes.

"Good morning," said the doctor.

David returned his greeting with the customary dignity of the Quakers.

"My name is Dr. Aesculapius."

"Thee is welcome."

"I was over to the m-m-meeting house last night, and heard your
s-s-speech. Didn't understand a w-w-word, but saw that you c-c-can talk
like a United States Senator."

David bowed and blushed.

"I came over to make you a p-p-proposition. Want you to yoke up with me,
and help me sell the 'B-B-Balm of the Blessed Islands.' You can do the
t-t-talking and I'll run the b-b-business; see?"

He put his thumbs in the armholes of his vest, spread his feet apart,
squared himself and smiled like a king who had offered his throne to a
beggar.

David regarded him with a look of astonishment.

"What do you s-s-say?"

Gravely, placidly, the young Quaker answered: "I thank thee, friend, for
what thee evidently means as a kindness, but I must decline thy offer."

"Decline my offer? Are you c-c-crazy? Why do you d-d-decline my offer?"

"Because I have no wish to leave my home and work."

Although his answer was addressed to the man, his eyes were directed to
the woman. His reply, simple and natural enough, astounded the quack.

"What!" he exclaimed. "Do you mean that you p-p-prefer to stay in this
p-p-pigstye of a town to becoming a citizen of the g-g-great world?"

"I do."

"But listen; I will pay you more money in a single month than you can
earn by d-d-driving your plow through that b-b-black mud for a whole
year."

"I have no need and no desire for more money than I can earn by daily
toil."

"No need and no desire for money! B-b-bah! You are not talking to
sniveling old women and crack-b-b-brained old men; but to a f-f-feller
who can see through a two-inch plank, and you can't p-p-pass off any of
your religious d-d-drivel on him, either."

This coarse insult went straight to the soul of the youth. His blood
tingled in his veins. There was a tightening around his heart of
something which was out of place in the bosom of a Quaker. A hot reply
sprang to his lips, but died away as he glanced at the woman, and saw
her face mantled with an angry flush.

Calmed by her silent sympathy, he quietly replied: "Friend, I have no
desire to annoy thee, but I have been taught that 'the love of money is
the root of all evil,' and believing as I do I could not answer thee
otherwise than I did."

It was evident from the look upon the countenance of the quack that he
had met with a new and incomprehensible type of manhood. He gazed at the
Quaker a moment in silence and then exclaimed, "Young man, you may mean
what you say, b-b-but you have been most infernally abused by the
p-p-people who have put such notions in your head, for there is only one
substantial and abiding g-g-good on earth, and that is money. Money is
power, money is happiness, money is God; get money! get it anywhere! get
it anyhow, but g-g-get it."

Instead of mere resentment for a personal insult, David now felt a tide
of righteous indignation rising in his soul at this scorn and denial of
those eternal principles of truth and duty which he felt to be the very
foundations of the moral universe.

"Sir," said he, with the voice and mien of an apostle, "I perceive that
thou art in the gall of bitterness and the bonds of iniquity. Thy money
perish with thee. The God of this world hath blinded thine eyes."

The quack, who now began to take a humorous view of the innocence of the
youth, burst into a boisterous guffaw.

"Well, well," he said in mingled scorn and pity, "reckon you are more to
be pitied than b-b-blamed. Fault of early education! Talk like a
p-p-parrot! What can a young fellow like you know about life, shut up
here in this seven-by-nine valley, like a man in a b-b-barrel looking
out of the b-b-bung-hole?"

Offended and disgusted, the Quaker was about to turn upon his heel; but
he saw in the face of the man's beautiful companion a look which said
plainly as spoken words, "I, too, desire that you should go with us."

This look changed his purpose, and he paused.

"Listen to me now," continued the doctor, observing his irresolution.
"You think you know what life is; but you d-d-don't! Do you know what
g-g-great cities are? Do you know what it is to m-m-mix with crowds of
men, to feel and perhaps to sway their p-p-passions? Do you know what it
is to p-p-possess and to spend that money which you d-d-despise? Do you
know what it is to wear fine clothes, to d-d-drink rare wines, to see
great sights, to go where you want to and to do what you p-p-please?"

"I do not, nor do I wish to. And thee must abandon these follies and
sins, if thee would enter the Kingdom of God," David replied, fixing his
eyes sternly upon the face of the blasphemer.

"God! Ha, ha, ha! Who is He, anyhow? Same old story! Fools that can't
enjoy life, d-d-don't want any one else to! Ever hear 'bout the fox that
got his tail b-b-bit off? Wanted all the rest to have theirs! What the
d-d-deuce are we here in this world for? T-t-tell me that, p-p-parson!"

"To do the will of our Father which is in heaven."

"To do the will of our Father in heaven! I know but one will, and it is
the w-w-will of Doctor P-p-paracelsus Aesculapius. I'm my own lord and
law, I am."

"Know thou that for all thy idle words, God will bring thee to
judgment?" David answered solemnly.

"Rot!" muttered the doctor, disgusted beyond endurance, and concluding
the interview with the cynical farewell,

"Good-bye, d-d-dead man! I have always hated c-c-corpses! I am going
where men have red b-b-blood in their veins."

With these words he turned on his heel and started toward the carriage,
leaving David and Pepeeta alone. Neither of them moved. The gypsy
nervously plucked the petals from a daisy and the Quaker gazed at her
face. During these few moments nature had not been idle. In air and
earth and tree top, following blind instincts, her myriad children were
seeking their mates. And here, in the odorous sunshine of the May
morning, these two young, impressionable and ardent beings, yielding
themselves unconsciously to the same mysterious attraction which was
uniting other happy couples, were drawn together in a union which time
could not dissolve and eternity, perhaps, cannot annul.

Having stalked indignantly onward for a few paces, the doctor discovered
that his wife had not followed him, and turning he called savagely:
"Pepeeta, come! It is folly to try and p-p-persuade him. Let us leave
the saint to his prayers! But let him remember the old p-p-proverb,
'young saint, old sinner!' Come!"

He proceeded towards the carriage; but Pepeeta seemed rooted to the
ground, and David was equally incapable of motion. While they stood
thus, gazing into each other's eyes, they saw nothing and they saw all.
That brief glance was freighted with destiny. A subtle communication had
taken place between them, although they had not spoken; for the eye has
a language of its own.

What was the meaning of that glance? What was the emotion that gave it
birth in the soul? He knew! It told its own story. To their dying day,
the actors in that silent drama remembered that glance with rapture and
with pain.

Pepeeta spoke first, hurriedly and anxiously: "What did you say last
night about the 'light of life?' Tell me! I must know."

"I said there is a light that lighteth every man that cometh into the
world."

"And what did you mean? Be quick. There is only a moment."

"I meant that there is a light that shines from the soul itself and that
in this light we may walk, and he who walks in it, walks safely. He need
never fall!"

"Never? I do not understand; it is beautiful; but I do not understand!"

"Pepeeta!" called her husband, angrily.

She turned away, and David watched her gliding out of his sight, with an
irrepressible pain and longing. "I suppose she is his daughter," he said
to himself, and upon that natural but mistaken inference his whole
destiny turned. Something seemed to draw him after her. He took a step
or two, halted, sighed and returned to his labor.

But it was to a strangely altered world that he went. Its glory had
vanished; it was desolate and empty, or so at least it seemed to him,
for he confounded the outer and the inner worlds, as it was his nature
and habit to do. It was in his soul that the change had taken place. The
face of a bad man and of an incomprehensible woman followed him through
the long furrows until the sun went down. He was vaguely conscious that
he had for the first time actually encountered those strenuous elements
which draw manhood from its moorings. He felt humiliated by the
recognition that he was living a dream life there in his happy valley;
and that there was a life outside which he could not master so easily.
That confidence in his strength and incorruptibility which he had always
felt began to waver a little. His innocence appeared to him like that of
the great first father in the garden of Eden, before his temptation, and
now that he too had listened to the voice of the serpent and had for the
first time been stirred at the description of the sweetness of the great
tree's fruit, there came to him a feeling of foreboding as to the
future. He was astonished that such characters as those he had just
seen did not excite in him loathing and repulsion. Why could he not put
them instantly and forever out of his mind? How could they possess any
attractiveness for him at all--such a blatant, vulgar man or such an
ignorant, ah! but beautiful, woman; for she was beautiful!
Yes--beautiful but bad! But no--such a beautiful woman could not be bad.
See how interested she was about the "inner light." She must be very
ignorant; but she was very attractive. What eyes! What lips!

Thoughts which he had always been able to expel from his mind before,
like evil birds fluttered again and again into the windows of his soul.
For this he upbraided himself; but only to discover that at the very
moment when he regretted that he had been tempted at all, he also
regretted that he had not been tempted further.

All day long his agitated spirit alternated between remorse that he had
enjoyed so much, and regret that he had enjoyed so little. Never had he
experienced such a tumult in his soul. He struggled hard, but he could
not tell whether he had conquered or been defeated.

It was not until he had retired to his room at night and thrown himself
upon his knees, that he began to regain peace. There, in the stillness
of his chamber, he strove for the control of his thoughts and emotions,
and fell asleep after long and prayerful struggles, with the sweet
consciousness of a spiritual triumph!




CHAPTER VI.

THE TRAIL OF THE SERPENT

     "Every man living shall assuredly meet with an hour of temptation,
     a critical hour which shall more especially try what metal his
     heart is made of"--South.


It was long after he had awakened in the morning before the memory of
the adventure of yesterday recurred to David's mind. His sleep had been
as deep as that of an infant, and his rest in the great ocean of
oblivion had purified him, so that when he did at last recall the
experience which had affected him so deeply, it was with indifference.
The charm had vanished. Even the gypsy's beauty paled in the light of
the Holy Sabbath morning. He could think of her with entire calmness,
and so thoroughly had the evil vanished that he hoped it had disappeared
forever. But he had yet to learn that before evil can be successfully
forgotten it must be heroically overcome.

He did not yet realize this, however, and his bath, his morning prayer,
a passage from the gospel, the hearty breakfast, the kind and trustful
faces of his family, dispelled the last cloud from the sky of his soul.
Having finished the round of morning duties, he made himself ready to
visit the lumber camp, there to discharge the sacred duty revealed to
him in the vision.

The confidence reposed by the genuine Quaker in such intimations of the
Spirit is absolute. They are to him as imperative as the audible voice
of God to Moses by the burning bush.

"Farewell, mother, I am off," he said, kissing her upon the white
forehead.

"Thee is going to the lumber camp, my son?" she asked, regarding him
with ill-concealed pride.

"I am, and hope to press the truth home to the hearts of those who shall
hear me," replied the young devotee, his face lighting up with the
blended rapture of religious enthusiasm, youth and health.

"The Lord be with thee and make thy ministrations fruitful," his mother
said, and with this blessing he set off.

As the young mystic had yesterday thought the world dark and stormy
because of the tempest in his soul, so now he thought it still and
peaceful, because of his inward calm. The very intensity of his recent
struggles had rendered his soul acutely sensitive, like a delicate
musical instrument which responded freely to the innumerable fingers
wherewith Nature struck its keys. Her manifold forms, her gorgeous
colors, her gigantic forces thrilled and intoxicated him.

That sense of fellowship with all the forms of life about him, which is
characteristic of all our moments of deepest rapture in the embrace of
Nature, filled his soul with joy. He accosted the trees as one greets a
friend; he chatted with the brooks; he held conversation with the little
lambs skipping in the pastures, and with the horses that whinnied as he
passed.

Such opulent moments come to all in youth; moments when the soul,
unconscious of its chains because they have not been stretched to their
limits, roams the universe with God-like liberty and joy.

Had he been asked to analyze these exquisite emotions, the young Quaker
would have said that they were the joys of the indwelling of the Divine
Spirit. He did not realize how much of his exhilaration came from the
feelings awakened by the experiences of the day before. One might almost
say that a spiritual fragrance from the woman who had crossed his path
was diffusing itself through the chambers of his soul. It was like the
odor of violets which lingers after the flowers themselves are gone.

Up to this time, he had never felt the mighty and mysterious emotion of
love. More than once, when he had seen the calm face of Dorothy Fraser,
soft and tender feelings had arisen in his heart; but they were only the
first faint gleams of that conflagration which sooner or later breaks
forth in the souls of men like him.

It was this confusion of the sources of his happiness which made him
oblivious to the struggle that was still going on within his mind. The
question had been raised there as to whether he had chosen wisely in
turning his back upon the joys of an earthly life for the joys of
heaven. It had not been settled, and was waiting an opportunity to
thrust itself again before his consciousness. In the meantime he was
happy. Never had he seemed to himself more perfectly possessed by the
Divine Spirit than at the moment when he reached the summit of the last
hill, and looked down into the valley where lay the lumber-camp. He
paused to gaze upon a scene of surpassing loveliness, and was for a
moment absorbed by its beauty; but a sudden discovery startled and
disturbed him. There was no smoke curling from the chimneys. There were
no forms of men moving about in their brilliant woolen shirts; he
listened in vain for voices; he could not even hear the yelp of the
ever-watchful dogs.

"Can it be possible that I have been deceived by my vision?" he asked
himself.

It was the first real skepticism of his life, and crowding it back into
his heart as best he could, he pressed on, excited and curious. As he
approached the rude structure, the signs of its desertion became
indubitable. He called, but heard only the echo of his own voice. He
tried the door, and it opened. Through it he entered the low-ceiled
room. On every hand were evidences of recent departure; living coals
still glowed in the ashes and crumbs were scattered on the tables. There
could be no longer any doubt that the lumbermen had vanished. The last
and most incontrovertible proof was tacked upon the wall in the shape of
a flat piece of board on which were written in a rude scrawl these
words: "We have gone to the Big Miami."

The face so bright and clear a moment ago was clouded now. He read the
sentence over and over again. He sat down upon a bench and meditated,
then rose and went out, walking around the cabin and returning to read
the message once more. If he had spoken the real sentiment of his heart
he would have said: "I have been deceived." He did not speak, however,
but struggled bravely to throw off the feelings of surprise and doubt;
and so, reassuring his faith again and again by really noble efforts,
took from his pocket the lunch his mother had prepared, and ate it
hungrily although abstractedly. As he did so, he felt the animal joy in
food and rest, and his courage and confidence revived.

"It is plain," he said to himself, "that God has sent me here to try my
faith. All he requires is obedience! It is not necessary that I should
understand; but it is necessary that I should obey!"

The idea of a probation so unique was not distasteful to his romantic
nature, and he therefore at once addressed himself to the business upon
which he had come. He had been sent to preach, and preach he would.
Drawing from the inner pocket of his coat a well-worn Bible, he turned
to the fourteenth chapter of the Gospel of Saint John, rose to his feet
and began to read. It was strange to be reading to this emptiness and
silence, but after a moment he adjusted himself to the situation. The
earnest effort he was making to control his mind achieved at least a
partial success. His face brightened, he conjured up before his
imagination the forms and faces of the absent men. He saw them with the
eye of his mind. His voice grew firm and clear, and its tones reassured
him.

Having finished the lesson, he closed the volume and began to pray. Now
that his eyes were shut, the strangeness of the situation vanished
entirely. He was no longer alone, for God was with him. The petition was
full of devotion, tenderness and faith, and as he poured it forth his
countenance beamed like that of an angel. When it was finished he began
the sermon. The first few words were scarcely audible. The thoughts were
disconnected and fragmentary. He suffered an unfamiliar and painful
embarrassment, but struggled on, and his thoughts cleared themselves
like a brook by flowing. Each effort resulted in a greater facility of
utterance, and soon the joy of triumph began to inspire him. The old
confidence returned at last and his soul, filled with faith and hope and
fervor, poured itself forth in a full torrent. He began to be awed by
the conjecture that his errand had some extraordinary although hidden
import. Who could tell what mission these words were to accomplish in
the plans of God? He remembered that the waves made by the smallest
pebble flung into the ocean widen and widen until they touch the
farthest shore, and he flung the pebbles of his speech into the great
ocean of thought, transported by the hope of sometime learning that
their waves had beat upon the shores of a distant universe.

Suddenly, in the midst of this tumultuous rush of speech, he heard, or
thought he heard, a sound. It seemed to him like a sob and there
followed stumbling footsteps as of some one in hurried flight, but he
was too absorbed to be more than dimly conscious of anything save his
own emotions.

And yet, slight as was this interruption, it served to agitate his mind
and bring him down from the realms of imagination to the world of
reality. His thoughts began to flow less easily and his tongue
occasionally to stammer; the strangeness of his experience came back
upon him with redoubled force; the chill influence of vacancy and
emptiness oppressed him; his enthusiasm waned; what he was doing began
to seem foolish and even silly.

Just at that critical moment there occurred one of those trifling
incidents which so often produce results ridiculously disproportionate
to their apparent importance. Through the open door to which his back
was turned, a little snake had made its way into the room, and having
writhed silently across the floor, coiled itself upon the hearth-stone,
faced the speaker, looked solemnly at him with its beady eyes, and
occasionally thrust out its forked tongue as if in relish of his words.

That fixed and inscrutable gaze completed the confusion of the orator.
He suddenly ceased to speak, and stood staring at the serpent. His face
became impassive and expressionless; the pupils of his eyes dilated; his
lips remained apart; the last word seemed frozen on his tongue. Not a
shade of thought could be traced on his countenance and yet he must
have been thinking, for he suddenly collapsed, sank down on a rude bench
and rested his head on his hands as if he had come to some disagreeable,
and perhaps terrible conclusion. And so indeed he had. The uneasy
suspicions which had been floating in his mind in a state of solution
were suddenly crystallized by this untoward event. The absurdity of a
man's having tramped twenty miles through an almost unbroken wilderness
to preach the gospel to a garter snake, burst upon him with a crushing
force. This grotesque denouement of an undertaking planned and executed
in the loftiest frame of religious enthusiasm, shook the very foundation
of his faith.

"It is absurd, it is impossible, that an infinite Spirit of love and
wisdom could have planned this repulsive adventure! I have been misled!
I am the victim of a delusion!" he said to himself, in shame and
bitterness.

To him, Christianity had been not so much a system of doctrines based
upon historical proofs, as emotions springing from his own heart. He
believed in another world not because its existence had been testified
to by others, but because he daily and hourly entered its sacred
precincts. He had faith in God, not because He had spoken to apostles
and prophets, but because He had spoken to David Corson. Having received
direct communication from the Divine Spirit, how could he doubt? What
other proof could he need?

Suddenly, without warning and without preparation, the foundation upon
which he had erected the superstructure of his faith crumbled and fell.
He had been deceived! The communications were false! They had originated
in his own soul, and were not really the voice of God.

Through this suspicion, as through a suddenly-opened door, the powers of
hell rushed into his soul and it became the theater of a desperate
battle between the good and evil elements of life. Doubt grappled with
faith; self-gratification with self-restraint; despair with hope; lust
with purity; body with soul.

He heard again the mocking laughter of the quack, and the stinging words
of his cynical philosophy once more rang in his ears. What this coarse
wretch had said was true, then! Religion was a delusion, and he had been
spending the best portion of his life in hugging it to his bosom. Much
of his youth had already passed and he had not as yet tasted the only
substantial joys of existence,--money, pleasure, ambition, love! He felt
that he had been deceived and defrauded.

A contempt for his old life and its surroundings crept upon him. He
began to despise the simple country people among whom he had grown up,
and those provincial ideas which they cherished in the little, unknown
nook of the world where they stagnated.

During a long time he permitted himself to be borne upon the current of
these thoughts without trying to stem it, till it seemed as if he would
be swept completely from his moorings. But his trust had been firmly
anchored, and did not easily let go its hold. The convictions of a
lifetime began to reassert themselves. They rose and struggled
heroically for the possession of his spirit.

Had the battle been with the simple abstraction of philosophic doubt,
the good might have prevailed, but there obtruded itself into the field
the concrete form of the gypsy. The glance of her lustrous eye, the
gleam of her milk-white teeth, the heaving of her agitated bosom, the
inscrutable but suggestive expression of her flushed and eager face,
these were foes against which he struggled in vain. A feverish desire,
whose true significance he did not altogether understand, tugged at his
heart, and he felt himself drawn by unseen hands toward this mysterious
and beautiful being. She seemed to him at that awful moment, when his
whole world of thought and feeling was slipping from under his feet, the
one only abiding reality. She at least was not an impalpable vision, but
solid, substantial, palpitating flesh and blood. Like continuously
advancing waves which sooner or later must undermine a dyke, the
passions and suspicions of his newly awakened nature were sapping the
foundations of his belief.

At intervals he gained a little courage to withstand them, and at such
moments tried to pray; but the effort was futile, for neither would the
accustomed syllables of petition spring to his lips, nor the feelings of
faith and devotion arise within his heart. He strove to convince
himself that this experience was a trial of his faith, and that if he
stood out a little longer, his doubt would pass away. He lifted his head
and glanced at the serpent still coiled upon the hearth. Its eyes were
fixed upon him in a gorgon-like stare, and his doubts became positive
certainties, as disgust became loathing. The battle had ended. The
mystic had been defeated. This sudden collapse had come because the
foundations of his faith had been honeycombed. The innocent serpent had
been, not the cause, but the occasion.

Influences had been at work, of which the Quaker had remained
unconscious. He had been observing, without reflecting upon, many facts
in the lives of other men, experiences in his own heart, and apparent
inconsistencies in the Bible. There was also a virus whose existence he
did not suspect running in his very blood! And now on top of the rest
came the bold skepticism of the quack, and the bewildering beauty of the
gypsy.

Yes, the preliminary work had been done! We never know how rotten the
tree is until it falls, nor how unstable the wall until it crumbles. And
so in the moral natures of men, subtle forces eat their way silently and
imperceptibly to the very center.

A summer breeze overthrows the tree, the foot of a child sets the wall
tottering; a whisper, a smile, even the sight of a serpent, is the jar
that upsets the equilibrium of a soul.

The Quaker rose from his seat in a fever of excitement. He seized the
Bible lying open on the table, hurled it frantically at the snake and
flung himself out of the open door into the sunshine. A wild
consciousness of liberty surged over him.

"I am free," he exclaimed aloud. "I have emancipated myself from
superstition. I am going forth into the world to assert myself, to
gratify my natural appetites, to satisfy my normal desires. It was for
this that life was given. I have too long believed that duty consisted
in conquering nature. I now see that it lies in asserting it. I have too
long denied myself. I will hereafter be myself. That man was
right--there is no law above the human will."




CHAPTER VII.

THE CHANCE WORD

     "A man reforms his habits altogether or not at all."
                                                    --Bacon.


David was not mistaken in his vague impression that he had heard a sob
and footsteps outside the cabin door.

The little band of lumbermen abandoning their camp in the early light of
the morning for another clearing still farther in the wilderness, had
already covered several miles of their journey when their leader
suddenly discovered that he had forgotten his axe, and with a wild
volley of oaths turned back to get it.

Even in that region, where new types of men sprang up like new varieties
of plants after a fire has swept over a clearing, there was not to be
found a more unique and striking personality than Andy McFarlane. In
physique he was of gigantic proportions, his hair and beard as red as
fire, his voice loud and deep, his eyes blue and piercing. Clad in the
gay-colored woolen shirt, the rough fur cap, and the high-topped boots
of a lumberman, his appearance was bold and picturesque to the last
degree.

Nor were his mental powers inferior to his physical. Although unable to
read or write, he could both reason and command. His keen perceptions,
his ready wit, his forcible logic and his invincible will had made him
a leader among men and the idol of the rude people among whom he passed
his days.

Repelled and disgusted with those manifestations of the religious life
with which alone he was familiar, he was still an unconscious worshiper.
The woods, the hills, the rivers and the stars awoke within him a
response to the beautiful, the sublime and awe-inspiring in the natural
universe.

But because of ignorance, the mysteries of existence which ought to have
made him devout had only rendered him superstitious, though, all unknown
to himself, his bosom was full of inflammable materials of a deeply
religious life. A spark fell upon them that Sunday morning and kindled
them into a conflagration. Nothing else can so enrage a nature like his
as having to retrace its steps. He could have walked a hundred miles
straight forward without a feeling of fatigue or a sense of hardship;
but every backward step of his journey had put him more out of temper.
He reached the clearing in a towering passion and was bewildered at
hearing in what he supposed to be a deserted room, the sound of a human
voice in whose tones there was a peculiar quality which aroused his
interest and perhaps excited his superstition. He crept toward the rude
cabin on his tiptoes, paused and listened. What he heard was the voice
of the young mystic, pouring out his heart in prayer.

For the first time in his life McFarlane gave serious attention to a
petition addressed to the Supreme Being. Other prayers had disgusted him
because of their vulgar familiarity with the Deity, or repelled him by
their hypocrisy; but there was something so sincere and simple in the
childlike words which issued from the cabin as to quicken his soul and
turn his thoughts upon the mysteries of existence. He had received the
gift of life as do the eagles and the lions--without surprise. Had any
one asked him: "Andy McFarlane, what is life?" he would have answered:
"Life? Why it is just life."

But suddenly a voice, heard in the quiet of a wilderness, a voice full
of tenderness and pathos, issuing from unknown and invisible lips and
ascending into the vast and illimitable spaces of air, threw wide open
the gates of mystery. His heart was instantly emptied of its passions;
his soul grew calm and his whole nature became as impressionable as wax.

When at length the prayer had ended and the sermon began, every power of
his mind was strained to its utmost capacity, and he listened as if for
life. The buried germs of desires and aspirations of which he had never
dreamed were quickened into life with the rapidity of the outburst of
vegetation in a polar summer. Words and phrases which had hitherto
seemed to him the utterances of fools or madmen, became instinct with a
marvelous beauty and a wondrous meaning. They flashed like balls of
fire. They pierced like swords. They aroused like trumpets. Such was
the susceptibility of this great soul, and such was the power of that
simple eloquence.

Andy McFarlane, the child of poverty, the rude lumberman, the hardy
frontiersman, was by nature a poet and a seer, and this was his new
birth into his true inheritance. Those eyes which had never wept, swam
in tears. Those knees which had never trembled before the visible, shook
in the presence of the unseen.

The emotions have their limitations as well as the thoughts, and
McFarlane had endured all that he was capable of sustaining. With a
profound sob, in which he uttered the feelings he could not speak, he
turned and fled. It was this sob and these footsteps which David heard.

Plunging into the depths of the forest as a wounded animal would have
done, he cast himself upon the bosom of the earth at the foot of a great
tree, to find solitude and consolation.

There are wounds in the soul too deep to be healed by the balm which
exudes from the visible elements of Nature. There are longings and
aspirations which the palpable and audible cannot satisfy. Not what he
sees and touches, but what he hopes and trusts, can save man in these
dark moments from the final despair and terror of existence.

Upon such an hour as this the lumberman had fallen. God had thrust
Himself upon his attention. Instead of being compelled to seek a
religious experience, he found it impossible to escape it.

The religious experiences of men in any such epoch possess a certain
general similarity. Sometimes thought, sometimes action and sometimes
emotion furnish the all-pervasive element. Whatever this peculiar
characteristic may be, its manifestations are always most vivid and
violent in ignorant periods, and along the uncultivated frontiers of
advancing civilization. In those rude days and regions, the victims (if
one might say so) of religion experienced nervous excitations and
emotional transports which not infrequently terminated in convulsions.
Days and nights, weeks and even months, were often spent by them in
struggles which were always painful and often terrible.

Andy McFarlane had often enough witnessed and despised these
experiences; but through those almost inexorable laws of association and
imitation, they were more than likely to reproduce themselves in him.
And so indeed they did. Under the influence of these new thoughts that
had seized him with such power, he writhed in agony on the ground. A
profound "conviction of sin" took possession of his soul and he felt
himself to be hopelessly and forever lost. That hell at which he had so
often scoffed suddenly opened its jaws beneath his feet, and although he
shuddered at the thought of being engulfed in its horrors, he felt that
such a doom would be the just desert of a life like his.

Hours passed in which his calmest thoughts were those of complete
bewilderment and helplessness, and in which he seemed to himself to be
floating upon a wide and shoreless sea, or wandering in a pathless
wilderness or winging his way like a lost bird through the trackless
heavens. However large an element of unreality and absurdity there may
have been in such experiences, it is certain that changes of the most
startling and permanent character were often wrought in the natures of
those who passed through them, and when McFarlane at last emerged from
this spiritual excitement he was a strangely altered man. He seemed to
find himself in another and more beautiful world. Looking around him
with a childlike wonder, he rose and made his way back to the cabin. He
listened at the door, but heard no sound. He entered, found the room
empty, and gave himself up to rude and unscientific speculation as to
the nature of this mysterious adventure. Nothing helped to solve the
problem, until at last he discovered the Bible, which the Quaker had
hurled at the snake, lying upon the hearthstone. It did not explain
everything, but it served to connect the inexplicable with the real and
human, and he carried the book with him when he returned to his
companions with his recovered axe.

That Bible became a "lamp to his feet and a light to his path." By
patient labor he learned to read it, and soon grew to be so familiar
with its contents, that he was able not only to communicate its matter
to others, in the new and beautiful life which he began to live, but to
give it new power for those men in the plain and homely language of
which he had always been a master.

The lion had become a lamb, the eagle a dove. He moved among his men,
the incarnation of gentleness and truth. Under his powerful influence
the camp passed through a marvelous transformation. From this limited
sphere of influence, his fame began to extend into a larger region. He
was sent for from far and near to tell the story of his strange
conversion, and in time abandoned all other labor and gave himself
entirely to the preaching of the Gospel.

It was as if the spirit of love and faith which had departed from the
Quaker had entered into the lumberman.




CHAPTER VIII.

A BROKEN REED

     "Superstition is a senseless fear of God."
                                     --Cicero.


The address of the young Quaker in the meeting house and the interview
with him by the roadside had opened a new epoch in the life of the
Fortune Teller.

Her idea of the world was a chaos of crude and irrational conceptions.
The superstitions of the gypsies by whom she had been reared were
confusedly blended with those practical but vicious maxims which
governed the conduct of her husband.

For her, the world of law, of order, of truth, of justice had no
existence. The quack cared little what she thought, and had neither the
ability nor the interest to penetrate to the secrets of her soul.

She had lived the dream life of an ignorant child up to the moment when
David had awakened her soul, and now that she really began to grapple
with the problems of existence, she had neither companion nor teacher to
help her.

The two objects about which her thoughts had begun to hover helplessly
were the God of whom David had spoken and the Quaker himself. Both of
them had profoundly agitated her mind and heart, and still haunted her
thoughts.

During all of Saturday after the interview, through the evening which
she had passed in her booth, and far into the night, she had revolved in
her mind the words she had heard, and attempted to weave these two
mysterious beings into her confused scheme of thought.

Her disappointment at David's refusal to accompany them in their
wandering life had been bitter. She did not comprehend the nature of her
feeling for him; but his presence gave her so exquisite a happiness that
the thought of never seeing him again had become intolerable.

For the first time she, who had been for years, as she thought,
disclosing the future to other people, was seized with a burning
curiosity as to her own. Up to this crisis of her experience she had
lived in the present moment; but now she must look into to-morrow and
see if the Quaker was ever to cross her path again. For so important, so
delicate and so difficult a discovery it seemed to her that the ordinary
instruments of her art were pitifully inadequate. The playing cards, the
lines upon her hands, the leaves in her tea cup would not do. She would
resort to that charm which the old gypsy had given her at parting, and
which she had reserved for some great and critical moment of life. That
moment had arrived.

As she enjoyed the most perfect freedom in all her movements, she
snatched an early and hurried breakfast Sunday morning, told her husband
that she was going to the woods for wild flowers, and set forth upon an
errand pregnant with destiny.

With an instinct like that of a wild creature she made her way swiftly
towards the great forest which lay at a little distance from the
outskirts of the village.

Her ignorance, her inexperience, her sadness and her beauty would have
stirred the hardest heart to compassion. Arrived at the point where she
was to confront the great spiritual problems of existence, she might
almost as well have been the first woman who had ever done so, for she
knew nothing of the experiences of others who had encountered them, and
she had scarcely heard an echo of the great life-truths which seers have
been ages in discovering. She had to sound her way across the perilous
sea of thought without any other chart than the faded parchment of the
gypsy, and those few incomprehensible words which she had heard from the
lips of the young Quaker.

It is good for us that upon this vast and unknown sea of life, God's
winds and waves are wiser and stronger than the pilots, and often bring
our frail crafts into havens which we never sought! Perhaps the act
which Pepeeta was about to perform had more ethical and spiritual value
than the casual observer would suppose, because of the perfect sincerity
with which she undertook its performance. No priestess ever entered an
oracle, no vestal virgin a temple, nor saint a shrine with more
reverence than she felt, as she passed into the silence of this
primeval forest.

Neither David nor Pepeeta knew anything of each other's movements, but
they started upon their different errands at almost the same moment and
were pursuing parallel courses with only a low ridge of hills between
them. Each was following the brightest light that had shone upon the
pathway of life. Both were absorbed with the highest thoughts of which
they were capable. As invisible planets deflect the stars from their
orbits, these two were imperceptibly diverting each other from the way
of duty. The experiences of this beautiful morning were to color the
lives of both forever.

As soon as Pepeeta had escaped from the immediate environments of the
village, she gave herself wholly to the task of gathering those
ingredients which were to constitute the mixture she planned to offer to
her god. She first secured a cricket, a lizard and a frog, and then the
herbs and flowers which were to be mingled with them. Thrusting them all
into a little kettle which swung on her arm, she surrendered herself to
the silent and mysterious influences of the forest. At the edge of the
primeval wilderness a solemn hush stole over her. She entered its
precincts as if it were a temple and she a worshiper with a votive
offering. Threading her way through the winding aisles of the great
cathedral, she was exalted and transported. The fitful fever cooled in
her veins. She absorbed and drew into her own spirit the calm and
silence of the place, and she was in turn absorbed and drawn into the
majestic life around her. The distinctively human seemed to slip from
her like a garment, and she was transformed into a creature of these
solitudes. Her movements resembled those of a fawn. Her great,
gazelle-like eyes peered hither and thither, as if ever upon the watch
for some hidden foe. It was as if her life in the habitations of men had
been an enforced exile, and she had now returned to her native haunts.

As she penetrated more and more deeply into the wood, her confidence
increased; she stepped more firmly, removed her hat, shook out her long
black tresses, listened to the songs of birds piping in the tops of
trees, and exulted in the consciousness of freedom and of kinship with
these natural objects. With a sudden and impulsive movement, she drew
near to the smooth trunk of a great beech, put her arms around it, laid
her cheek against it and kissed the bark. She was prompted by the same
instinct which made St. Francis de Assisi call the flowers "our little
sisters,--" an inexplicable sense of companionship and fraternity with
living things of every kind.

Her swift footsteps brought her at last to the summit of a low line of
hills, and she glided down into an unpeopled and shadow-haunted valley
through which ran a crystal stream. Perceiving the fitness of the place
for her purpose, she hastened forward smiling, and, heated with her
journey, threw herself down by the side of the brook and plunged her
face into its cool and sparkling waters. Then she lifted her head and
carried the water to her lips in the palm of her dainty hand, and as she
drank beheld the image of her face on the surface of a quiet little
pool. Small wonder that she stooped to kiss the red lips which were
mirrored there! So did the fair Greek maidens discover and pay tribute
to their own loveliness, in the pure springs of Hellas.

Refreshed by the cooling draught, the priestess now addressed herself to
her task. Gazing for an instant around the majestic temple in which her
act of worship was to be performed, she began like some child of a long
gone age to rear an altar. Selecting a few from the many boulders that
were strewn along the edge of the stream, she arranged them so as to
make an elevated platform upon which she heaped dry leaves, brushwood
and dead branches. Over it she suspended a tripod of sticks, and from
this hung her iron kettle. Drawing from her pocket flint and steel, she
struck them together, dropped a spark upon a piece of rotten wood,
purred out her pretty cheeks and blew it into a flame. As the fire
caught in the dry brushwood and began to leap heavenward, she followed
it with her great brown eyes until it vanished into space. Her spirit
thrilled with that same sense of awe and reverence which filled the
souls of primitive men when they traced the course of the darting flames
toward the sky. In the presence of fire, some form of worship is
inevitable. Before conflagrations our reveries are transformed into
prayers. The silently ascending tongues of flame carry us involuntarily
into the presence of the Infinite.

Filling her kettle with water from the running brook, she stirred into
it the herbs, the berries, the lizard, the frog and the cricket. This
part of her work completed, she sat down upon a bed of moss, drew forth
the sacred parchment and read its contents again and again.

"When the cauldron steams, dance about the fire and sing this song. As
the last words die away Matizan will leap from the flames and reveal to
thee the future."

Credulous child that she was, not the faintest shadow of a doubt floated
across her mind. She thrust the parchment back into her bosom, and as
the water began to bubble, leaped to her feet, threw her arms above her
head, sprang into the air, and went whirling away in graceful curves and
bacchantean dances.

There were in these movements, as in every dance, mysterious and perhaps
incomprehensible elements.

Who can tell whether they have their origin in the will of the dancer
alone, or in some outside force? The daisies in the meadow and the waves
of the sea dance because they are agitated by the wind. The little cork
automaton upon the sounding board of a piano dances because it is
agitated by the vibrations of the strings. The little children in the
alleys of a great city seem to be agitated in the same way by the
hurdy-gurdy!

Perhaps the rhythmic beating of the feet upon the ground surcharges the
body with electrical force, as by the touch of a magnet. There is a
mystery in the simplest phenomena of life.

Pepeeta, dancing upon the green moss beneath the great beech trees,
seemed to be in the hands of some external power, and could scarcely
have been distinguished from an automaton! She had brought her
tambourine, and holding it on high with her left hand or extending it
far forward, she tapped it with her fingers or her knuckles, until all
its brazen disks tingled and its little bells gave out a sweet and
silvery tintinnabulation.

The dancer's movements were alternately sinuous, undulatory and gliding.
At one moment her supple form, bending humbly toward the earth,
resembled the stem of a lily over-weighted with its blossom; the next, a
branch of a tree flung upward by a tempest; the next, a column of autumn
leaves caught up by a miniature whirlwind and sent spinning along a
winding path.

Her eyes glowed, her cheeks burned and her bosom heaved with excitement.
She seemed either to have caught from nature her own mood, or else to
have communicated hers to it, for while she danced all else danced with
her, the water in the brook, the squirrels in the tree-tops, the shadows
on the moss, and the leaves on the branches.

Following the directions of the parchment, she continued to spin and
flutter around the fire until the water in the kettle began to boil. At
the first ebullitions, she stood poised for an instant upon her toe,
like the famous statue of Mercury, and so lightly that she seemed to be
sustained by undiscoverable wings, or to float, like a bubble, of her
own buoyancy.

Settling down at length as if she were a hummingbird lighting upon a
flower, she began to circle slowly around the fire and sing. The melody
was in a minor key and full of weird pathos. The words were these:

     "God of the gypsy camp, Matizan, Matizan,
       Open the future to me--
     Me thy true worshiper, here in this solitude,
       Offering this incense to thee.

     "Matizan, Matizan, God of the future days,
       Come in the smoke and the fire;
     Kaffaran, Kaffaran, Muzsubar, Zanzarbee;
       Bundemar, Omadar, Zire."

As the last syllable fell from her lips, the loathsome decoction boiled
over, and the singer, pausing as if suddenly turned to marble, stood in
statuesque beauty, her arms extended, her lips parted, her eyes fixed.
Expectancy gave place to surprise, surprise to disappointment,
disappointment to despair.

The lips began to quiver, the eyes to fill with tears; her girlish
figure suddenly collapsed and sank upon the ground as the sail of a
vessel falls to the deck when a sudden blast of wind has snapped its
cordage.

While the broken-hearted and disillusioned priestess lay prostrate
there, the fire spluttered, the birds sang cheerfully in the treetops,
and the brook murmured to the grasses at its marge. No unearthly voice
disturbed the tranquillity of the forest, and no unearthly presence
appeared upon the scene. The great world spirit paid no more attention
to the prone and weeping woman than to the motes, that were swimming
gaily in the sunbeams.

As for her, poor child, her life faith had been dissipated in a single
instant, and the whole fabric of her thought-world demolished in a
single crash.

What had happened to the Quaker in the lumber camp, had befallen the
gypsy in the forest. But while in his case the disappearance of faith
had been followed by a sudden eruption of evil passions, in hers a
vanished superstition had given place to a nascent spiritual life.

The seed of religious truth sown by his hand in the fertile soil of her
heart already struck its roots deep down. She did not in any full degree
comprehend his words; but that reiterated statement that "there is a
light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world" had made an
indelible impression upon her mind and was destined to accomplish great
results.

As she lay crushed and desolate in her disillusionment, her mind began
of its own accord suddenly to feed upon this new hope. She could not be
said to have been reasoning, as David was doing in the cabin. Her nature
was emotional rather than intellectual, or at least her powers of reason
had never been developed. She could not therefore think her way through
these pathless regions over which she was now compelled to pass; she
could only feel her way. The thoughts which began to course through her
mind did not originate in any efforts of the will, but issued
spontaneously from the depths of her soul, and as they arose without
volition, so did they flow on until they finally became as pure and
clear as the waters of the brook by whose banks she lay.

When her emotions had expended their force and she arose, an experience
befell her which revealed the immaturity of her mind.

The idea of that "inner light" had taken complete possession of her
soul, and so when she suddenly perceived a long bright path of gold
which a beam of the setting sun had thrown along the floor of the
forest, like a shining track in the direction of the village, she
thought it had emerged from the depths of her own spirit.

Without a moment's hesitation she entered this golden highway and sped
along! Not for another instant did she regret the failure of the gypsy
god to meet her. She knew well enough, now, the way to find her path
amid the mysteries of life! She had but to follow this light!

The shining pathway led her to the summit of the hill; and as she began
to descend the other slope, it vanished with the sun. But she was not
troubled, for she saw at a glance that the brook to whose banks she was
coming was the one flowing through the farm of the Quaker. "Perhaps I
shall see him again," she said to herself, and the hope made her
tumultuously happy.

She had lost all consciousness of the flight of time, and now noticed
with surprise that it was evening. The crows were winging their way to
their nesting ground; the rabbits were seeking their burrows; the whole
animal world was faring homeward. Some universal impulse seemed to be
driving them along their predestined paths, as it drove the brooks and
the clouds, and Pepeeta appeared, as much as they, to be borne onward by
a power above herself. She was but little more conscious of choosing her
path than the doe who at a little distance was hurrying home to her
mate; so completely were all her volitional powers in abeyance to the
emotional elements of her soul.




CHAPTER IX.

WHERE PATHS CONVERGE

     "If we do meet again, we'll smile indeed;
     If not, 'tis true this parting was well made."
                                 --Julius Caesar.


Violent emotions, like the lunar tides, must have their ebb because they
have their flow. The feelings do not so much advance like a river, as
oscillate like a pendulum.

Striding homeward after his downfall in the log cabin, David's
determination to join his fortunes to those of the two adventurers began
to wane. He trembled at an unknown future and hesitated before untried
paths.

Already the strange experience through which he had just passed began to
seem to him like a half-forgotten dream. The refluent thoughts and
feelings of his religious life began to set back into every bay and
estuary of his soul.

With a sense of shame, he regretted his hasty decision, and was saying
to himself, "I will arise and go to my Father," for all the experiences
of life clothed themselves at once in the familiar language of the
Scriptures.

It is more than likely that he would have carried out this resolution,
and that this whole experience would have become a mere incident in his
life history, if his destiny had depended upon his personal volition.
But how few of the great events of life are brought about by our choice
alone!

Just at sunset, he crossed the bridge over the brook which formed the
boundary line of the farm, and as he did so heard a light footstep.
Lifting his eyes, he saw Pepeeta, who at that very instant stepped out
of the low bushes which lined the trail she had been following.

Her appearance was as sudden as an apparition and her beauty dazzled
him. Her face, flushed with exercise, gleamed against the background of
her black hair with a sort of spiritual radiance. When she saw the
Quaker, a smile of unmistakable delight flashed upon her features and
added to her bewitching grace. She might have been an Oread or a Dryad
wandering alone through the great forest. What bliss for youth and
beauty to meet thus at the close of day amid the solitudes of Nature!

Had Nature forgotten herself, to permit these two young and
impressionable beings to enjoy this pleasure on a lonely road just as
the day was dying and the tense energies of the world were relaxed?
There are times when her indifference to her own most inviolable laws
seems anarchic. There are moments when she appears wantonly to lure her
children to destruction.

They gazed into each other's eyes, they knew not how long, with an
incomprehensible and delicious joy, and then looked down upon the
ground. Having regained their composure by this act, they lifted their
eyes and regarded each other with frank and friendly smiles.

"I thought thee had gone," said David.

"We stayed longer than we expected," Pepeeta replied.

"Has thee been hunting wild flowers?" he asked, observing the bouquet
which she held in her hand.

"I picked them on the way."

"Has thee been walking far?"

"I have not thought."

"It is easy to walk in these spring days."

"I must have found it so, for I have been out since sunrise, and am not
tired."

"Thee does love the woods?"

"Oh, so much! I am a sort of wild creature and should like to live in a
cave."

"I am afraid thee would always turn thy face homeward at dusk, as thee
is doing now," he said with a smile.

"Oh, no! I am not afraid! I go because I must."

"I will join thee, if I may. The same path will take us toward our
different destinations."

"Oh, I shall be glad, for I want to ask you many questions. I can think
of nothing else but what I heard you say in the meeting house."

"I fear I have said some things which I do not understand myself," he
replied, with a flush, remembering the experience through which he had
just passed.

The path was wide enough for two, and side by side they moved slowly
forward.

The somber garb in which he was dressed, and the brilliant colors of her
apparel, afforded a contrast like that between a pheasant and a scarlet
tanager. Color, form, motion--all were perfect. They fitted into the
scene without a jar or discord, and enhanced rather than disturbed the
harmony of the drowsy landscape.

As they walked onward, they vaguely felt the influence of the repose
that was stealing upon the tired world; the intellectual and volitional
elements of their natures becoming gradually quiescent, the emotions
were given full sway. They felt themselves drawn toward each other by
some irresistible power, and, although they had never before been
conscious of any incompleteness of their lives, they suddenly discovered
affinities of whose existence they had never dreamed. Their two
personalities seemed to be absorbed into one new mysterious and
indivisible being, and this identity gave them an incomprehensible joy.
Over them as they walked, Nature brooded, sphynx-like. Their young and
healthy natures were tuned in unison with the harmonies of the world
like perfect instruments from which the delicate fingers of the great
Musician evoked a melody of which she never tired, reserving her
discords for a future day. On this delicious evening she permitted them
to be thrilled through and through with joy and hope and she accompanied
the song their hearts were singing with her own multitudinous voices.
"Be happy," chirped the birds; "be happy," whispered the evening
breeze; "be happy," murmured the brook, running along by their side and
looking up into their faces with laughter. The whole world seemed to
resound with the refrain, "Be happy! Be happy! for you are young, are
young, are young!"

Pepeeta first broke the silence.

"I had never heard of the things about which you talked," she said.

"Thee never had? How could that be? I thought that every one knew them!"

"I must have lived in a different world from yours."

"What sort of a world has thee lived in?"

"A world of fairs and circuses, of traveling everywhere and never
stopping anywhere."

"Has thee never been in a church?"

"Never until that night."

"And thee knows nothing of God?"

"Nothing except the gypsy god, and he was not like yours."

"And thee was happy?"

"I thought so until I heard what you said. Since then I have been full
of care and trouble. I wish I knew what you meant! But I have seen that
wonderful light!"

"Thee has seen it?"

"Yes, to-day! And I followed it; I shall always follow it."

"When does thee leave the village?" David asked, fearing the
conversation would lead where he did not want to go.

"To-morrow," she said.

"Does thee think that the doctor would renew his offer to take me with
him?"

"Do I think so? Oh! I am sure."

"Then I will go."

"You will go? Oh! I am so happy! The doctor was very angry; he has not
been himself since. You don't know how glad he will be."

"But will not thee be happy, too?" he asked.

"Happier than you could dream," she answered with all the frankness of a
child. "But what made you change your mind?"

"I will tell thee sometime; it is too late now. There is my home and I
have much work to do before dark."

"Home!" she echoed. "I never had a home, or at least I cannot remember
it. We have always led a roving life, here to-day and gone to-morrow. It
must be sweet to have a home!"

"Thee has always led a roving life and wishes to have a home? I have
always had a home, and wish to lead a roving life," said David.

They looked at each other and smiled at this curious contradiction. They
smiled because they were not yet old enough to weep over the
restlessness of the human heart.

Having reached the edge of the woods, where their paths separated, they
paused.

"We must part," said David.

"Yes; but we shall meet to-morrow."

"We shall meet to-morrow."

"You are sure?"

"I am sure."

"You will not change your mind?"

"I could not if I would."

"Good-bye."

"Good-bye."

At the touch of their hands their young hearts were swayed by tender and
tumultuous feelings. A too strong pressure startled them, and they
loosened their grasp. The sun sank behind the hill. The shadows that
fell upon their faces awakened them from their dreams. Again they said
goodbye and reluctantly parted. Once they stopped and, turning, waved
their hands; and the next moment Pepeeta entered the road which led her
out of sight.

In this interview, the entire past of these two lives seemed to count
for nothing.

If Pepeeta had never seen anything of the world; if she had issued from
a nunnery at that very moment, she could not have acted with a more
utter disregard of every principle of safety.

It was the same with David. The fact that he had been reared a Quaker;
that he had been dedicated to God from his youth; that he had struggled
all his days to be prepared for such a moment as this, did not affect
him to the least degree.

The seasoning of the bow does not invariably prevent it from snapping.
The drill on the parade ground does not always insure, courage for the
battle. Nothing is more terrible than this futility of the past.

Such scenes as this discredit the value of experience, and attach a
terrible reality to the conclusion of Coleridge, that "it is like the
stern-light of a vessel--illuminating only the path over which we have
traveled."

Nor did the future possess any more power over their destinies than the
past. Not a conscious foreboding disturbed their enjoyment of that brief
instant which alone can be called the present.

And yet, no moment in their after lives came up more frequently for
review than this one, and in the light of subsequent events they were
forced to recognize that during every instant of this scene there was an
uneasy but unacknowledged sense of danger and wrong thrilling through
all those emotions of bliss.

It is seldom that any man or woman enters into the region of danger
without premonitions. The delicate instincts of the soul hoist the
warning signals, but the wild passions disregard them.

It was to this moment that their consciences traced their sorrows; it
was to that act of their souls which permitted them to enjoy that
momentary rapture that they attached their guilt; it was at that moment
and in that silent place that they planted the seeds of the trees upon
which they were subsequently crucified.




CHAPTER X.

A POISONED SPRING

     "It was the saying of a great man, that if we could trace our
     descents, we should find all slaves to come from princes and all
     princes from slaves!"--Seneca.


Early the next morning the two adventurers took their departure.

The jovial quack lavished his good-byes upon the landlord and the
"riff-raff" who gathered to welcome the coming or speed the parting
guest at the door of the country tavern. He drove a pair of beautiful,
spirited horses, and had the satisfaction of knowing that he excited the
envy of every beholder, as he took the ribbons in his hand, swung out
his long whip and started.

If her husband's heart was swelling with pride, Pepeeta's was bursting
with anxiety. An instinct which she did not understand had prevented her
from telling the doctor of her interview with the Quaker. Long before
the farmhouse came in sight she began to scan the landscape for the
figure which had been so vividly impressed upon her mind.

The swift horses, well fed and well groomed, whirled the light wagon
along the road at a rapid pace and as they passed the humble home of the
Quaker, Pepeeta saw a little child driving the cows down the long lane,
and a woman moving quietly among the flowers in the garden; but David
himself was not to be seen.

"He has gone," she said to herself joyously.

On through the beech grove, around the turn of the road, into full view
of the bridge, they sped.

It was empty! And yet it was there that he had agreed to meet them!

A tear fell from her eye, and her chin quivered. With the utmost effort
of her will she could not repress these evidences of her disappointment,
and with a spasmodic motion she clutched the arm of the driver as if it
were that of Destiny and she could hold it back.

So sudden and so powerful was the grasp of her young hand, that it
turned the horses out of the road and all but upset the carriage.

With a violent jerk of the reins, the astonished driver pulled them
back, and exclaimed with an oath:

"You little wild cat, if you ever d-d-do that again, I will throw you
into the d-d-ditch!"

"Excuse me!" she answered humbly, cowering under his angry glances.

"What in the d-d-deuce is the matter?" he asked more kindly, seeing the
tears in her eyes.

"I do not know. I am nervous, I guess," she answered sadly.

"Nervous? P-p-pepeeta Aesculapius nervous? I thought her nerves were
m-m-made of steel? What is the m-m-matter?" he asked, looking at her
anxiously.

His gentleness calmed her, and she answered: "I am sorry to leave a
place where I have been so happy. Oh! why cannot we settle down
somewhere and stay? I get so tired of being always on the wing. Even the
birds have nests to rest in for a little while. Are we never going to
have a home?"

"Nonsense, child! What do we want with a h-h-home? It is better to be
always on the go. I want my liberty. It suits me best to fly through the
heavens like a hawk or swim the deep sea like a shark. A home would be a
p-p-prison. I should tramp back and forth in it like a polar bear in a
c-c-cage."

Pepeeta answered with a sigh.

"Cheer up, child," he cried in his hearty fashion. "Your voice sounds
like the squeak of a mouse! B-b-be gay! Be happy! How can you be sad on
a morning like this? Look at the play of the muscles under the smooth
skins of the horses! Remember the b-b-bright shining dollars that we
coaxed out of the tightly b-b-buttoned breeches pockets of the
gray-backed Q-Q-Quakers. What more do you ask of life? What else can it
g-g-give?"

"It does not make me happy! I shall never be happy until I have a home,"
she said, still sobbing, and trying to conceal the cause of her grief
from herself as well as from her husband.

Nothing could have astonished the great, well-fed animal by her side
more than this confession. In all his life he had never heaved a sigh.
His contentment was like that of a lion in a forest full of antelopes.
But if he was fierce and cruel to others, he was at least kind to his
mate, and he now put his great paw around her little shoulders and gave
her one of his leonine kisses.

"You are as melancholy as an unstrung d-d-drum," he said. "I must cheer
you up. How would you like a s-s-song? What shall it be? 'Love's Young
D-D-Dream'? All right. Here g-g-goes."

And at the word, he opened his great mouth and stuttered it forth in
stentorian tones that went bellowing among the hills like the echoes of
thunder.

Pepeeta smiled at his kindness and was grateful for his clumsy efforts
at consolation; but they did not dispel her sadness. Her spirits sank
lower and lower. The light seemed to have faded out of the world, and
the streams of joy to have run dry. She sighed again in spite of
herself, and in that sigh exhaled the hope which had sprung from her
heart at the prospects of a new and sweet companionship.

She had divined the cause of her disappointment with an unerring
instinct. It was exactly as she thought. At the last instant, David's
heart had failed him.

On the preceding evening, he had hurried through his "chores," excused
himself from giving an account of the adventures of the day on the
ground of fatigue, and retired to his room to cherish in his heart the
memories of that beautiful face and the prospects of the future. He
could not sleep. For hours he tossed on his bed or sat in the window
looking out into the night, and when at last he fell into an uneasy
slumber his dreams were haunted by two faces which struggled ceaselessly
to crowd each other from his mind. One was the young and passionate
countenance of the gypsy, and the other was that of his beautiful mother
with her pale, carven features, her snow-white hair, her pensive and
unearthly expression. They both looked at him, and then gazed at each
other. Now one set below the horizon like a wan, white moon, and the
other rose above it like the glowing star of love. Now the moon passed
over the glowing star in a long eclipse and then disappearing behind a
cloud left the brilliant star to shine alone.

When he awoke the gray dawn revealed in vague outline the realities of
the world, and warned him that he had but a few moments to execute his
plans. He sprang from his couch strong in his purpose to depart, for the
fever of adventure was still burning in his veins, and the rapturous
looks with which Pepeeta had received his promise to be her companion
still made his pulses bound. He hurriedly put a few things into a bundle
and stole out of the house.

As he moved quietly but swiftly away from the familiar scenes, his heart
which had been beating so high from hope and excitement began to sink in
his bosom. He had never dreamed of the force of his attachment to this
dear place, and he turned his face toward the old gray house again and
again. Every step away from it seemed more difficult than the last, and
his feet became heavy as lead. But he pressed on, ashamed to
acknowledge his inability to execute his purpose. He came to the last
fence which lay between him and the bridge where he had agreed to await
the adventurers, and then paused.

He was early. There was still time to reflect. Had the carriage arrived
at that moment he would have gone; but it tarried, and the tide of love
and regret bore him back to the old familiar life. "I cannot go. I
cannot give it up," he murmured to himself.

Torn by conflicting emotions, inclining to first one course and then
another, he finally turned his face away from the bridge and fled,
impelled by weakness rather than desire. He did not once look back, but
ran at the top of his speed straight to the old barn and hid himself
from sight. There, breathless and miserable, he watched. He had not long
to wait. The dazzling "turn-out" dashed into view. On the high seat he
beheld Pepeeta, saw the eager glance she cast at the farm house,
followed her until they arrived at the bridge, beheld her
disappointment, raved at his own weakness, rushed to the door, halted,
returned, rushed back again, returned, threw himself upon the sweet
smelling hay, cursed his weakness and indecision and finally surrendered
himself to misery.

From the utter wretchedness of that bitter hour, he was roused by the
ringing of the breakfast bell. Springing to his feet, he hastened to the
spring, bathed his face, assumed a cheerful look and entered the house.

For the first time in his life he attempted the practice of deception,
and experienced the bitterness of carrying a guilty secret in his bosom.
How he worried through the morning meal and the prayer at the family
altar, he never knew, and he escaped with inexpressible relief to the
stable and the field to take up the duties of his daily life. He found
it plodding work, for the old inspirations to endeavor had utterly
vanished. He who had hitherto found toil a beatitude now moved behind
the plow like a common drudge.

Tired of the pain which he endured, he tried again and again to forget
the whole experience and to persuade himself that he was glad the
adventure had ended; but he knew in his heart of hearts that he had
failed to follow the gypsy, not because he did not really wish to, but
because he did not wholly dare. The consciousness that he was not only a
bad man but a coward, added a new element to the bitterness of the cup
he was drinking.

Each succeeding day was a repetition of the first, and became a painful
increment to his load of misery and unrest. The very world in which he
lived seemed to have undergone a transformation. The sunlight had lost
its glory, the flowers had become pale and odorless, the songs of the
birds dull and dispiriting.

What had really changed was the soul of the young recluse and mystic.
The consciousness of God had vanished from it; the visions of the
spiritual world no longer visited it; he ceased to pray in secret, and
the petitions which he offered at the family altar were so dull and
spiritless as even to excite the observation and comment of his little
nephew.

"Uncle Dave," remarked that fearless critic, "you pray as if you were
talking down a deep well."

No wonder that the child observed the fact upon which he alone had
courage to comment, for there is as great a difference between a prayer
issuing from the heart and one merely falling from the lips as between
water gushing from a fountain and rain dripping from a roof.

Some men pass their lives in the midst of environments where insincerity
would not have been so painful; but in a home and a community where sham
and hypocrisy were almost unknown these perpetual deceptions became more
and more intolerable with every passing hour. Nothing could be more
certain than that in a short time, like some foreign substance in a
healthy body, his nature would force him out of this uncongenial
environment. With some natures the experience would have been a slow and
protracted one, but with him the termination could not be long delayed.

It came in a tragedy at the close of the next Sabbath. The day had been
dreary, painful and exasperating beyond all endurance, and he felt that
he could never stand the strain of another. And so, having detained his
mother in the sitting room after the rest of the family had retired, he
paced the floor for a few moments, and after several unsuccessful
attempts to introduce the subject gently, said bluntly:

"Mother, I am chafing myself to death against the limitations of this
narrow life."

"My son," she said calmly, "this has not come to me as a surprise."

He moved uneasily and looked as if he would ask her "Why?"

"Because," she said, as if he had really spoken, "a mother possesses the
power of divination, and can discern the sorrows of her children, by a
suffering in her own bosom."

The consciousness that he had caused her pain rendered him incapable of
speech, and for a moment they sat in silence.

"What is thy wish and purpose, my son?" she asked at last, with an
effort which seemed to exhaust her strength.

"I wish to see the world," he answered, his eye kindling as he spoke.

This reply, foreseen and expected as it was, sent a shiver through her.
She turned paler, if possible, than before; but summoning all the powers
of self-control resident in that disciplined spirit, she replied with an
enforced tranquillity:

"My son, does thee know what this world is which thee fain would see?"

"I have seen it in my dreams. I have heard its distant voices calling to
me. My spirit chafes to answer their summons. I strain at my anchor
like a great ship caught by the tide."

"Shall I tell thee what this world of which thee has dreamed such dreams
is really like, my son?" she asked, struggling to maintain her calm.

"How should thee know?"

"I have seen it."

"Thee has seen it? I thought that thee had passed thy entire life among
the Quakers," he answered with surprise.

"I say that I have seen it. Shall I tell thee what it is?" she resumed,
as if she had not heard him.

"If thee will," he answered, awed by a strange solemnity in her manner.

Her quick respirations had become audible. Small but intensely red spots
were burning on either cheek. Her white hands trembled as they clutched
the arms of the old rocking chair in which she sat.

"I will!" she said, regarding him with a look which seemed to devour him
with yearning love. "This world whose voices thee hears calling is a
fiction of thine own brain. That which thee thinks thee beholds of glory
and beauty thee hast conjured up from the depths of a youthful and
disordered fancy, and projected into an unreal realm. That world which
thee has thus beheld in thy dreams will burst like a pin-pricked bubble
when thee tries to enter it. It is not the real world, my son. How shall
I tell thee what that real world is? It is a snare, a pit-fall. It is a
flame into which young moths are ever plunging. It promises, only to
deceive; it beckons, only to betray; its smiles are ambushes; it is
sunlight on the surface, but ice at the heart; it offers life, but it
confers death. I bid thee fear it, shun it, hate it!"

She leaned far forward in her chair, and her face upon which the youth
had never seen any other look but that of an almost unearthly calm, was
glowing with excitement and passion.

"Mother," he exclaimed, "what does thee know of this world, thee who has
passed thy life in lonely places and amongst a quiet people?"

She rose and paced the floor as if to permit some of her excitement to
escape in physical activity, and pausing before him, said: "My only and
well-beloved son, thee does not know thy mother. A veil has been drawn
over that portion of her life which preceded thy birth, and its secrets
are hidden in her own heart. She has prayed God that she might never
have to bring them forth into the light; but he has imposed upon her the
necessity of opening the grave in which they are buried, in order that,
seeing them, thee may abandon thy desires to taste those pleasures which
once lured thy mother along the flower-strewn pathway to her sin and
sorrow."

Her solemnity and her suffering produced in the bosom of her son a
nameless fear. He could not speak. He could only look and listen.

"Thee sees before thee," she continued, "the faded form and features of
a woman once young and beautiful. Can thee believe it?"

He did not answer, for she had seemed to him as mothers always do to
children, to have been always what he had found her upon awakening to
consciousness. He could not remember when her hair was not gray.

Something in her manner revealed to the startled soul of the young
Quaker that he was about to come upon a discovery that would shake the
very foundation of his life; for a moment he could not speak.

The silence in which she awaited the answer to her question became
profound and in it the ticking of the old clock sounded like the blows
of a blacksmith's hammer, the purring of the cat like the roar of
machinery, and the beating of his heart like the dull thud of a
battering ram.

As if reading his inmost thoughts, the white-faced woman said: "And so
thee thought that I was always old and gray?"

As she uttered these words in a tone of indescribable sadness, a faint
smile played around the corners of her mouth--such a marble smile as
might have appeared upon the face of Niobe. In an instant more it had
composed itself into its former sadness, as a sheet of pure water
resumes its calmness, after having been lightly stirred by a summer
wind.

So long did she stand regarding him with looks of unutterable love that
he could not endure the strain of the withheld secret, but exclaimed
hoarsely: "Go on! Mother, for God's sake, go on! If thee has something
to disclose, reveal it at once!"

It seemed impossible for her to speak. The opening of the secrets of
her heart to God before the bar of judgment could have cost her no
greater effort than this confession to her son.

"David," she said, in a voice that sounded like an echo of a long-dead
past, "the fear that the sins of thy parents should be visited upon thee
has tormented every hour of my life. I have watched thee and prayed for
thee as no one but a mother who has drunk the bitter cup to its dregs
could ever do. I have trembled at every childish sin. In every little
fault I have beheld a miniature of the vices of thy mother and thy
father--thy father! Oh! David, my son--my son!"

The white lips parted, but no sound issued from them. She raised her
white hand and clutched at her throat as if choking. Then she trembled,
gasped, reeled, and fell forward into his arms.

In a moment more, the agitated heart had ceased to beat, and the secret
of her life was hidden in its mysterious silence. The sudden,
inexplicable and calamitous nature of this event came near unsettling
the mental balance of the sensitive and highly organized youth. Coming
as it did upon the very heels of the experiences which had so thoroughly
shaken his faith in the old life, he felt himself to be the target for
every arrow in the quiver of misfortune.

He seemed to himself not so much like a boat that had sprung a single
leak, as like one out of which every nail had been pulled and the joints
left open to the inrushing waters.

Into the unfilled gap in his mother's narrative, ten thousand suspicions
crept, each displacing the other and leaving him more and more in
darkness and in dread with regard to the origin of his own life.
Wherever he went and whatever he did these confused suspicions resounded
in his ears like the murmur in a seashell.

He did not dare communicate this story even to his sister; for if she
knew nothing he feared to poison her existence by telling her, and if
she knew all he had not the courage to listen to the sequel. Perhaps no
other experience in life produces a more profound shock than a discovery
like that upon which David had so suddenly stumbled. It leads to despair
or to melancholy, and many a life of highest promise has been suddenly
wrecked by it. While he brooded over this mystery the days slipped past
the young mystic almost unnoted; he wandered about the farm, passing
from one fit of abstraction into another, doing nothing, saying nothing,
thinking everything.

The world was shrouded in a gloom through whose shifting mists a single
star shone now and then, emitting a brilliant and dazzling ray. It was
the figure of a gypsy.

In his heavy, aching heart thoughts of her alone aroused an emotion of
joy. As other objects lost their power to attract or charm, she more and
more filled all his horizon.

Her name was whispered by each passing breeze. It was syllabled by every
singing bird. The old clock ticked it on the stairway. The hoofs of his
horse which he rode recklessly over the country uttered it to the hard
roads on which they fell--"Pepeeta, Pepeeta, Pepeeta."

Whenever he really tried to banish the temptations which haunted his
soul, they always returned to the swept and garnished chamber bringing
with them seven spirits worse than themselves.

He tried to look forward to the future with hope. But how can a man hope
for harvests, when all his seed corn has been destroyed? If his father
was bad, what hope was there that he could be better?

He made innumerable resolves to take up the duties of life where he had
laid them down, but they were all like birds which die in the nest where
they are born.

Pepeeta was drawing him irresistibly to herself; he was like a man in
the outer circle of a vortex, of which she was the center. The touch of
her soft hand which he could still feel, the farewell glance of eyes
which still glowed before his imagination, attracted him like a powerful
magnet. It was true that he did not know where she was; but he felt that
he could find her in the uttermost parts of the earth by yielding
himself to the impulse which she had awakened in his heart.

"A dark veil of mystery hangs over my past. My present is full of misery
and unrest. I will see if the future has any joys in store for me," he
said to himself at the close of one of his restless days.

Without so much as a word of farewell, he crept out of the house in the
gathering dusk, and started in pursuit of the bright object that floated
like a will-o'-the-wisp before his inner eye.

A feeling of exultation and relief seized him as he left the place made
dark and dreadful by the memory of that tragic scene through which he
had so recently passed; the quiet of the evening soothed his perturbed
spirits, and the tranquil stars looked down upon him with eyes that
twinkled as if in sympathy.

It is an old tradition of the monks, that when the sap begins to run in
the vines on sunny slopes, a revolt and discontent thrills in the
bottles imprisoned in the darkness of the wine vaults. Such a discontent
and fever had been thrilling in David's veins during these warm spring
days, when the whole world had been in a ferment of life, and he had
been bottled up in the gloom and narrowness of the little country
village; and yielding himself to the emotions that seethed in his
breast, he broke all the tender ties of the past and went blindly into
the future.

He had been suddenly fascinated by a beautiful woman and bewildered by
an unscrupulous man; he had felt the foundations of his religious faith
shaken, and discovered that his own life had sprung from an illicit
passion. These are violent blows, and many a man has gone down before a
single one of them. If the blows had been delivered singly at long
intervals he might have survived the shock; but following each other in
swift succession like great tidal waves they had literally swept him
from his moorings.

Such collapses fill us with horror and questioning. How do they come
about? Can they be prevented? These are the deepest problems of life,
and our psychology is still impotent to solve them. We can detect and
measure the dross in metals or the poison in drugs; but we have no
solvent that will reduce a complex nature like David's into its original
elements and enable us to differentiate a son's responsibility from that
of his father.

We make bold guesses and confident affirmations as to the comparative
influence of heredity and environment. We enter into learned
disputations as to the blessing or the bane of an education such as his.
But every such case is still a profound and insoluble mystery. The most
comprehensive laws and the most careful generalizations meet with too
many exceptions to enable us to form a science. The children of the good
are too often bad and the children of the bad too often good to permit
us to dogmatize about heredity. We learn as our experience deepens and
our horizon widens to regard such collapses with a compassionate
sympathy and a humbled consciousness of our own unfitness to judge and
condemn. Whether we create our individuality or only bring it to
light--is the question that makes us stumble! But while we move in the
midst of uncertainties in this realm, there is another in which we walk
in the glare of noonday. We know beyond the peradventure of a doubt
that whatever may be the origin of such weakness as that of the young
mystic, the results are always inevitable! Nature never asks any
questions nor makes any allowances. To her mind, sin is sin! Whatsoever
a man sows--that shall he also reap. Whether he yield to evil
voluntarily or be driven into it by resistless force; whether he sin
because of a self-originating propensity or because his father sinned
before him, is all one to those resistless executors of Nature's law,
sickness, sorrow, disaster, death!

No man ever defeated Nature! No man ever will! From the instant when he
turned his back upon his home, David's fate was sealed. He was playing
against a certainty and he knew it. But he ought to have remembered it!
It was of this that he ought to have been thinking, and not of the
gypsy's eyes!

Sometimes such men escape from the final catastrophe of the long series;
but not from the intermediate lashings!

This brutal, idiotic step of Corson's looks like a final plunge; a fatal
fall; a hopeless retrogression. But we must not judge prematurely. "Man
advances; but in spiral lines," said Goethe. The river goes forward, in
spite of its eddies. You can complete a geometric circle from a minute
portion of its curve; but not a human cycle. We can not predict the
final issue of a human life until the last sigh is drawn.




CHAPTER XI.

THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL

     "To tell men they cannot help themselves is to fling them into
     recklessness and despair."--Froude.


Although David did not know the exact route the quack had laid out for
his journey, he was certain that it would be easy enough to trace him in
that sparsely-settled region, and so he turned his face in the direction
in which the equipage vanished when he watched it from the barn. His
movements did not seem to come from his own volition but to originate in
something external. He had a sense of yielding to necessity. There are
heroic moments in our lives, when that subtle force we call our "will"
demonstrates, or at all events persuades us, that we are "_free_." There
are others, like those through which the young adventurer was now
passing, when we experience a feeling of utter helplessness amidst
cosmic forces and believe ourselves to be straws in a mighty wind or
ill-fated stars borne along a predestined orbit.

Surrendering himself to the current of events, the recalcitrant Quaker
escaped for a time the painful consciousness of personal responsibility.

The tranquil stars above him seemed to look down upon the wanderer in
silent approval. The night birds chanted their congratulations from the
tree tops, and reading his own thoughts into their songs he imagined he
heard them saying, "Let each one find his mate; let each one find his
mate."

The cool night breeze caressed and kissed him as it hurried by on silent
wings, and for an hour or two he tramped along with a peace in his heart
which seemed to be a reflection from the outside world.

But gradually a change came over the face of nature, and this, too,
reflected itself in the mirror of his soul.

In the heavens above him the clouds commenced to gather like hostile
armies. They skirmished, sent out their flying battalions and then fell
upon each other in irresistible fury. Great, jagged flashes of
lightning, like sword thrusts from gigantic and hidden hands rent the
sky; wild crashes of thunder pealed through the reverberating dome of
heaven; the rain fell in torrents; the elements of nature seemed to have
evaded their master, vaulted their barriers and precipitated themselves
in a furious struggle.

The lonely pilgrim perceived the resemblance which his conflicting
emotions bore to this wild scene, and smiled grimly. He found in all
this tumult a justification for the tempest in his soul.

It was not until the light of morning struggled through this universal
gloom, that the weary and bedraggled traveler entered the outskirts of
the then straggling but growing and busy village of Hamilton. Tired in
body and benumbed in mind, he made his way to the hotel, conscious only
of his desire and determination to look once more upon the face of the
woman whose image was so indelibly impressed upon his mind.

Approaching the desk he nervously asked if the doctor was among the
guests, flushed at the answer, demanded a room, ascended the steep
staircase, and was soon in bed and asleep. Fatigued by his long tramp,
he did not awaken until after noon, and then, having bathed, dressed and
broken his long fast, he knocked at the door of the room occupied by the
doctor and his wife.

There was a quick but gentle step in answer to his summons, and at the
music of that footfall his heart beat tumultuously. The door opened, and
before him stood the woman who had brought about this mysterious train
of events in his life.

She started back as she saw him, with an involuntary and timid motion,
but so great was her surprise and joy that she could not control her
speech or action sufficiently to greet him.

"Who is there?" cried the doctor, in his loud, imperative voice.

"Mr. Corson," she answered in tones that were scarcely audible.

"Corson? Who the d-d-deuce is Corson, and what the deuce does he want?"
he asked, rising and approaching the door.

The instant his eyes fell on the countenance of the Quaker, he threw up
both hands and uttered a prolonged whistle of astonishment.

"The preacher!" he exclaimed. "The lost is found. The p-p-prodigal has
returned. Come in, and let us k-k-kill the fatted calf!"

Coarse as the welcome was, it was full of sincerity, and its heartiness
was like balm to the wounded spirit of the youth. He grasped the
extended hand and permitted himself to be drawn into the room.

Pepeeta, who had recovered from the first shock of surprise and delight,
came forward and greeted him with a shy reserve. She gave him her hand,
and its gentle touch reanimated his soul. She smiled at him,--a gracious
smile, and its light illumined the darkness of his heart. His sadness
vanished. He once more felt an emotion of joy.

The excitement of their meeting having subsided they seated themselves,
David in an easy chair, the doctor on the broad couch, and Pepeeta on a
little ottoman at his feet. Vivid green curtains partially obscured the
bright sunshine which beat upon the windows. The wall-paper was cheap,
vulgar, faded. On the floor was an old ingrain carpet full of patches
and spattered with ink stains. A blue-bottle fly buzzed and butted his
head against the walls, and through the open casement hummed the traffic
of the busy little town.

Nothing could have been more expressive of triumph and delight than the
face of the quack. Whenever his feelings were particularly bland and
expansive, he had a way of taking the ends of his enormous moustache and
twirling them between his spatulate thumbs and fingers. He did this
now, and twisted them until the coarse hairs could be heard grating
against each other.

"Well, well!" he said, "so you could not resist the temptation? Ha! ha!
ha! No wonder! It's not every young fellow behind the p-p-plow-tail that
has a fortune thrust under his nose. Shows your g-g-good sense. I was
right. I always am. I knew you were too bright a man to hide your light
under a half b-b-bushel of a village like that. In those seven-by-nine
towns, all the sap dries out of men, and before they are forty they
begin to rattle around like peas in a p-p-pod. In such places young men
are never anything but milk sops, and old men anything but
b-b-bald-headed infants! You needed to see the world, young man. You
required a teacher. You have put yourself into good hands, and if you
stay with me you shall wear d-d-diamonds."

"Whatever the results may be, I have determined to make the experiment,"
said David, shrugging his shoulders.

"Right you are. But what b-b-brought you round? You were as stiff as a
ramrod when I left you."

"Circumstances over which I had no control, and which I want to forget
as soon as possible. My old life has ended and I have come to seek a new
one."

"A new life? That's good. Well--we will show it to you, P-P-Pepeeta and
I! We will show you."

"The sooner the better. What am I to do?"

"Not too fast! There are times when it is better to g-g-go slow, as the
snail said to the lightning. We must make a b-b-bargain."

"Make it to suit yourself."

"You d-d-don't expect me to stick to my old offer, I reckon. When I made
it, Mahomet went to the m-m-mountain, and now the mountain comes to
Mahomet; see?"

"Do as you please, I am in no mood to split hairs, nor pennies. All I
ask is a chance to put my foot upon the first round of the ladder and if
I do not get to the top, I shall not hold you responsible," David
replied, dropping the "thees" of his Quaker life, in his determination
to divest himself of all its customs as rapidly as he could.

"Hi! hi! There's fire in the flint! Good thing! you don't want to split
pennies! Well, if you d-d-don't, I don't. You take me on the right side,
D-D-Davy. I'll do the square thing by you--see if I d-d-don't. Let's
have a drink. Bring the bottle, Pepeeta!"

She went to the mantel and returned with a flask and two glasses. The
quack filled them both and passed one to David. It was the first time in
his life that he had ever even smelt an intoxicant. He recoiled a
little; but having committed himself to his new life, he determined to
accept all that it involved. He lifted the fiery potion to his lips, and
drank.

"Hot, is it, my son?" cried the doctor, laughing uproariously at his
wry face. "You Quakers drink too much water! Freezes inside of you and
t-t-turns you into what you might call two-p-p-pronged icicles. Give me
men with red blood in their veins! And there's nothing makes b-b-blood
red like strong liquors!"

The whisky revived the courage and loosened the tongue of the youth. The
repugnance which he had instinctively felt for the vulgar quack began to
mellow into admiration. He asked and answered many questions.

"What part am I to take in this business?" he asked.

"What part are you to take in the business? That's good, 'Never put off
till to-morrow what you can d-d-do to-day.' 'Business first and then
pleasure.' 'The soul of business is dispatch.' These are good mottoes,
my lad. I learned them from the wise men; but if I had not learned them,
I should have invented them. What's your p-p-part of the business, says
you; listen! You are to be its m-m-mouth-piece. That tongue of yours
must wag like the tail of a d-d-dog; turn like a weather-vane; hiss like
a serpent, drip with honey and poison, be tipped with p-p-persuasion;
tell ten thousand t-t-tales, and every tale must sell a bottle of
p-p-panacea!"

He paused, and looked rapturously upon the face of his pupil.

"This panacea--has it merits? Will it really cure?" asked David.

The doctor laughed long and loud.

"Has it merits? Will it really cure? Ho! ho! 'Is thy bite good for the
b-b-backache?' said the sick mouse to the cat. What difference does it
make whether it will cure or not? Success in b-b-business is not based
upon the quality of the m-m-merchandise, my son."

"Upon what, then?" said David.

"Upon the follies, the weaknesses and the p-p-passions of mankind! Since
time began, a universal panacea' has been a sure source of wealth. It
makes no difference what the panacea is, if you only have the b-b-brains
to fool the people. There are only two kinds of people in the world, my
son--the fools and f-f-foolers!"

Even whisky could not make David listen to this cold-blooded avowal
without a shudder.

The keen eye of the quack detected it; but instead of adulterating his
philosophy, he doubled his dose.

"Shocks you, does it? You will g-g-get over that. We are not angels! we
are only men. Remember what old Jack Falstaff said? 'If Adam fell in a
state, of innocency, what shall I d-d-do in a state of villainy?'"

The boldness of the man and the radicalness of his philosophy dazzled
and fascinated the inexperienced youth.

This was what the astute and unscrupulous instructor expected, and he
determined to pursue his advantage and effect, if possible, the complete
corruption of his pupil in a single lesson; and so he continued:

"Got to live, my son! Self-p-p-preservation is the first law, and so we
must imitate the rest of the b-b-brute creation, and live off of each
other! The big ones must feed upon the little and the strong upon the
weak. 'Every man for himself and the d-d-devil take the hindmost!'
That's my religion."

"You may be right," said David, "but I cannot say that I take to it
kindly. I do not see how a man can practice this cruelty and injustice
without suffering."

"Suffering! Idea of suffering is greatly exaggerated. Ever watch a
t-t-toad that was being swallowed by a snake? Looks as if he positively
enjoyed it. It's his mission. Born to be eaten! If there was as much
pain in the world as p-p-people say, do you think anybody could endure
it! Isn't the d-d-door always open? Can't a man quit when he wants to?
Suffering! Pshaw! Do I look as if I suffered? Does Pepeeta look as if
she suffered? And yet she b-b-bamboozles them worse than I do."

The head of the gypsy bent lower and lower over her crocheting.

"She plays upon them like a fife! They d-d-dance when she whistles! Next
to wanting a universal panacea for pain, the idiots want a knowledge of
the future! Everybody but me wants to know what kind of a to-morrow God
Almighty has made for him. I make my own to-morrows! I don't ask to
have my destiny made up for me like a t-t-tailor coat. I make my own
destiny. If things d-d-don't come my way, I just pull them! People talk
about 'following Providence!' I follow Providence as an Irishman follows
his wheel-barrow. I shove it! See? But that is not the way of the rest
of them, thank Fortune! And so Pepeeta gathers them in! Strange fish
g-g-get into her net, Davy. Back there in your own little t-t-town she
caught some of your long-faced old Quakers, b-b-big fellows with
broad-brimmed hats, drab coats and ox eyes, regular meetin'-goers! And
there was that little d-d-dove-eyed girl. What was it she wanted to
know, P-P-Pepeeta? Tell him. Ha! ha! Tell him and we will see him
b-b-blush."

"She asked me if her father was going to send her to Philadelphia this
winter," she answered, without lifting her eyes.

"I don't mean that!"

"She asked me whether I could tell them where to find the spotted
heifer."

"The d-d-deuce, child! Why don't you tell me what she asked you 'bout
D-D-Davy?"

"It is time for us to go to supper or we shall be late," she replied,
laying aside her work and rising.

"Sure enough!" cried the doctor, springing to his feet. "The Q-Q-Quaker
has knocked everything out of my head. Come on!"

He rose and began bustling about the room.

When Pepeeta glanced up from her work she saw in David's eye a grateful
appreciation of her courtesy and tact, and his look filled her with a
new happiness.

The disgust awakened in the Quaker's mind by the coarseness of the quack
was more than offset by the beauty and grace of the gypsy. When he
looked at her, when he was even conscious of her presence, he felt a
happiness which compensated for all that he had suffered or lost. He did
not stop to ask what its nature was. He had cast discretion to the
winds. He had in these few hours since his departure broken so utterly
with the past that he was like a man who had been suddenly awakened from
a long lapse of memory. His old life was as if it had never been. He
felt himself to be in a vacuum, where all his ideas must be newly
created. This epoch of his experience was superimposed upon the other
like a different geological formation. Like the old monks in their
cells, he was deliberately trying to erase from the parchment of his
soul all that had been previously written, in order that he might begin
a new life history.




CHAPTER XII.

THE MOTH AND THE FLAME

     "Misled by Fancy's meteor-ray
        By passion driven:
     But yet the light that led astray
        Was light from heaven."

     --Burns.


A little before dusk the three companions started upon their evening's
business. The horses and carriage were waiting at the door and they
mounted to their seats. David was embarrassed by the novelty of the
situation, and Pepeeta by his presence; but the quack was in his highest
spirits. He saluted the bystanders with easy familiarity, ostentatiously
flung the hostler a coin, flourished his whip and excited universal
admiration for his driving.

During the turn which they took around the city for an advertisement, he
indoctrinated his pupil with the principles of his art.

"People to-day are just what they were centuries ago. G-g-gull 'em just
as easy. Make 'em think the moon is made of g-g-green cheese--way to
catch larks is to p-p-pull the heavens down--extract sunbeams from
c-c-cucumbers and all the rest! There's one master-weakness, Davy. They
all think they are sick, or if they d-d-don't, you can make 'em!"

"What! Make a well man think he is sick?" the Quaker asked in
astonishment.

"Sure! That's the secret of success. I can pick out the strongest man in
the c-c-crowd and in five minutes have pains shooting through him like
g-g-greased lightning. They are all like jumping-jacks to the man that
knows them. You watch me pull the string and you-you'll see them
wig-wig-wiggle."

"It seems a pity to take advantage of such weakness in our fellow men,"
said David, whose heart began to suffer qualms as he contemplated this
rascality and his own connection with it.

"Fellow men! They are no fellows of mine. They are nuts for me to
c-c-crack. They are oysters for me to open!" responded the quack, as he
drove gaily into the public square and checked the horses, who stood
with their proud necks arched, champing their bits and looking around at
the crowd as if they shared their master's contempt.

Pepeeta descended from the carriage and made her way hastily into the
tent which had already been pitched for her. The doctor lighted his
torch and set his stock of goods in order while David, obeying his
directions, began to move among the people to study their habits.
Elbowing his way here and there, he contemplated the crowd in the light
of the quack's philosophy, and as he did so received a series of painful
mental shocks.

"The first principle in the art of painting a picture is to know where
to sit down;" in other words, everything depends upon the point of view.
Now that David began to look for evidences of the weaknesses and
follies of his fellow men, he saw them everywhere. For the first time in
his life he observed that startling prevalence of animal types which
always communicates such a shock to the mind of him who has never
discovered it before. Every countenance suddenly seemed to be the face
of a beast, but thinly and imperfectly veiled. There were foxes and
tigers and wolves, there were bulldogs and monkeys and swine. He had
always seen, or thought he saw, upon the foreheads of his fellow men
some evidence of that divinity which had been communicated to them when
God breathed into the great first father the breath of life; but now he
shuddered at the sight of those thick lips and drooping jaws, those dull
or crafty eyes, those sullen, sodden, gargoyle features, as men do at
beholding monstrosities.

A few weeks ago he would have felt a profound pity at this discovery,
but so rapid and radical had been the alteration in his feelings that he
was now seized by a sudden revulsion and contempt. "Are these creatures
really men?" he asked himself. He stood there among them taller,
straighter, keener, handsomer than them all, and the old feelings that
have made men aristocrats and tyrants in every age of the world, surged
in his heart and hardened it against them.

By this time the quack had finished his few simple preparations, and,
standing erect before his audience, began the business of the evening.

Having observed the habits of the game, David now chose a favorable
position to study those of the hunter. He watched with an almost
breathless interest every expression upon that sinister face and
listened with a boundless interest to every word that fell from those
treacherous lips.

He was not long in justifying the quack's honest criticism of his own
oratory. His voice lacked the vibrant tones of a musical instrument and
his rhetoric that fluency, without which the highest effects of
eloquence can never be attained. By speaking very slowly and
deliberately he avoided stammering, but this always acted like a
dragging anchor upon the movement of his thought. These were radical
defects, but in every other respect he was a consummate artist. He
arrested the attention of his hearers with an inimitable skill and held
it with an irresistible power.

His piercing eye noted every expression on the faces of his hearers, and
seemed to read the inmost secrets of their hearts. He perceived the
slightest inclination to purchase, and was as keen to see a hand steal
towards a pocket-book as a cat to see a mouse steal out of its hole.

He coaxed, he wheedled, he bantered, he abused,--he even threatened. He
fulfilled his promise to the letter, "to make the well men think that
they were sick," and many a stalwart frontiersman whose body was as
sound as an ox, began to be conscious of racking pains.

Nor were those legitimate arts of oratory the only ones which this
arch-knave practiced.

"I gave you two dollars, and you only gave me change for one," cried a
thin-faced, stoop-shouldered, helpless-looking fellow, who had just
purchased a bottle of the "Balm of the Blessed Islands."

With lightning-like legerdemain the quack had shuffled this bill to the
bottom of his pile, and lifting up the one that lay on top, exposed it
to the view of his audience.

"That's a lie!" he said, in his slow, impressive manner. "There is
always such a man as this in every crowd. Some one is always trying to
take advantage of those who, like myself, are living for the public
good. Gentlemen, you saw me lay the b-b-bill he gave me down upon the
top! Here it is; judge for yourselves. That is a bad man! Beware of
him!"

The bold effrontery of the quack silenced the timid customer, who could
only blush and look confused. His blushes and confusion condemned him
and the crowd hustled him away from the wagon. They believed him guilty
and he half believed it of himself.

David, who had seen the bill and knew the victim's innocence but not the
doctor's fraud, pressed forward to defend him. The quack stopped and
silenced him with an inimitable wink, and then instantly and with
consummate art diverted his auditors with a series of droll stories
which he always reserved for emergencies like this. They were old and
thread-bare, but this was the reason he chose them. He had one for
every circumstance and occasion.

There was a man standing in an outer circle of the crowd around whose
forehead was a bandage. "Come here, my friend," said the quack. "How did
you get this wound? Don't want to tell? Oh! well, that is natural. A
horse kicked him, no doubt; never got it in a row! No! No! Couldn't any
one hit him! Reminds me of the man who saw a big black-and-blue spot on
his boy's forehead. 'My son,' said he, 'I thought I told you not to
fight? How did you get this wound?' 'I bit it, father,' replied the boy.

"'Bit it!' exclaimed the old man in astonishment, 'how could you bite
yourself upon the forehead?'

"'I climbed onto a chair,' says he.

"And have you been climbing on a chair to bite your forehead, too, my
friend?" he asked with humorous gravity, while a loud guffaw went up
from the crowd.

"Well," he continued soothingly, "whether you did it or not, just let me
rub a little of this b-b-balm upon it, and by to-morrow morning it will
be well. There! that's right. One dollar is all it costs. You don't want
it? What the d-d-deuce did you let me open the b-b-bottle for? I'll
leave it to the crowd if that is fair? There, that is right. Pay for it
like a man. It's worth double its price. Thank you. By to-morrow noon
you will b-b-be sending me a testimonial to its value. Do you want to
hear some of my testimonials, gentlemen?"

The crowd shuffled and stood over on its other foot. The doctor, putting
an enormous pair of spectacles upon his nose, took up a piece of paper
and pretended to read slowly and carefully to avoid stammering:

"'Dr. Aesculapius.

"'Dear Sir: I was wounded in the Mexican war. I have been unable to walk
without crutches for many years; but after using your liniment, I ran
for office!' Think of it, gentlemen, the day of miracles has not passed.
'I lost my eyesight four years ago, but used a bottle of your "wash" and
saw wood.' Saw wood, gentlemen, what do you think of that? He saw wood!
'Some time ago I lost the use of both arms; but a kind friend furnished
me with a box of your pills, and the next day I struck a man for ten
dollars.' There is a triumph of the medical art, my friends. And yet
even this is surpassed by the following: 'I had been deaf for many
years, stone deaf; but after using your ointment, I heard that my aunt
had died and left me ten thousand dollars.' Think of it, gentlemen, ten
thousand dollars! And a written guarantee goes with every bottle, that
the first thing a stone-deaf man will hear after using this medicine
will be that his aunt has died and left him ten thousand dollars."

During all these varied operations, David had never taken his eyes from
the face of the quack. Even his quick wit had often been baffled by the
almost superhuman adroitness of this past grandmaster of his art.

The novelty of the scene, the skill of the principal actor, the rapid
growth of the piles of coin and bills, the frantic desire of the people
to be gulled, all served to obscure those elements which were calculated
to appeal to the Quaker's conscience. He felt like one awakened from a
dream. While he was still in the half dazed condition of such an
awakening, the quack gave him a sign that this part of his lesson was
ended, and following the direction of the thumb which he threw over his
shoulder towards Pepeeta's tent, he eagerly took his way thither.

Before the door stood several groups of young men and maidens, talking
under their breath as if in the presence of some august deity. Now and
then a couple disentangled itself from the crowd, and with visible
trepidation entered. As they reappeared, their friends gathered about
them and besought them to disclose the secrets they had discovered.

Some of them giggled and simpered, others laughed boisterously and
skeptically, while others still, looked scared and anxious. It was
evident that even those who tried to make light of what they had seen
and heard were moved by something awe-inspiring.

David listened to their silly talk, observed their bold demeanor and
their vulgar manners, while the impression of weakness, of stupidity, of
the lowness and beastiality of humanity made upon his mind by the aged
and the mature, was intensified by his observation of the young and
callow.

He did not anywhere see a spark of true nobility. He did not hear a word
of wisdom. Everything was moving on a low, material and animal plane. He
felt that manhood and womanhood was not what he had believed it to be.

From the outside of the gypsy's tent, he could make but few discoveries
of her method; and he waited impatiently until the last curious couple
had departed. When they had disappeared, he entered.

At the opposite side of the tent and reclining upon a low divan was the
gypsy. Above her head a tallow candle was burning dimly. Before her was
a rough table covered with a shawl, upon which were scattered cups of
tea with floating grounds, ivory dice, cards, coins and other implements
of the "Black Art."

Pepeeta sprang to her feet when she saw who her visitor was, and
exhibited the clearest signs of agitation. David's own emotions were not
less violent, for although the gypsy's surroundings were poor and mean,
they served rather to enhance than to diminish her exquisite beauty. Her
shoulders and arms were bare, and on her wrists were gold bracelets of
writhing serpents in whose eyes gleamed diamonds. On her fingers and in
her ears were other costly stones. Her dress was silk, and rustled when
she moved, with soft and sibilant sounds.

"The doctor has sent me here to study the methods by which you do your
work," said David approaching the table and gazing at her with
undisguised admiration.

"You should have come before. How can you study my methods when I am not
practicing them? And any way, you have no faith in them. Have you? I
always had until I heard your sermon in the little meeting house."

"And have you lost it now?"

"It has been sadly shaken."

"You can at least show me how you practice the art, even if you have
lost your faith in it. I too have lost a faith; but we must live. What
are these cards for?"

"If you wish me to show you, you may shuffle and cut them, but I would
rather tell your fortune by your hand, for I have more faith in
palmistry than in cards."

He extended his hand; she took it, and with her right forefinger began
to trace the lines. Her gaze had that intensity with which a little
child peers into the mechanism of a watch or an astronomer into the
depths of space.

A thrill of emotion shot through the frame of the Quaker at the touch of
those delicate and beautiful fingers.

The contrast between his own hands and hers was marked enough to be
almost ridiculous. Hers were tiny, soft and white. His were large, brown
and calloused. He thought to himself, "It is as if two little white
mice were playing about an enormous trap which in a moment may seize
them."

Neither of them, spoke. The delicate finger of the gypsy moved over the
lines of the palm like that of a little school-girl over the pages of a
primer. They did not realize how dangerous was that proximity, nor how
fatal that touch. Through those two poles of Nature's most powerful
battery, the magnetic and mysterious current of love was passing.

"What do you see?" said David, at last.

"Shall I tell you?" she asked, lifting her eyes to his.

"If you please," he said.

"I will do so if you wish; but if the story of your life is really
written in the palm of your hands, it is sad indeed, and you would be
happier if you knew it not."

"But it is not written there. I do not believe it, nor do you."

"Let us hope that it is not," she answered, and began the following
monologue in a low musical monotone:

"Marked as it is with the signs of toil, this hand has still retained
all those characteristics that an artist would choose as a model. It is
perfect in its form. The palm is of medium size, the fingers without
knots, the third phalanges are all long and pointed, and the thumb is
beautifully shaped. Whoever possesses a hand like this must be guided by
ideals. He is a worshiper of the sublime and beautiful. He disdains
small achievements, embarks enthusiastically upon forlorn hopes, and is
spurred to victory by the fervor of his desires.

"See this thumb! How finely it is pointed. The first phalanx is short,
and indicates that above all other things he is a man of heart and will
be dominated by his affections. He will yield to temptations, perhaps;
but the second phalanx is long and reveals a power of reason and logic
which will probably triumph at last."

Not a single word of all this had David heard. Her voice sounded to him
like the low droning of bees in a meadow, and he had been watching the
movements of her fingers, as he used to watch the dartings of the
minnows in the pools of the brook which ran through his farm.

"How smooth the fingers are! And how they taper to the cone," continued
Pepeeta. "Here is this one of Jupiter, for example. How plainly it tells
of religiousness and perhaps of fanaticism! The Sun finger is not long.
Nay, it is not long enough. There is too little love of glory here. And
the Saturnian finger is too long. The life is too much under the
dominion of Fate or Destiny. The Mercurial finger is short. He will be
firm in his friendships. The moons all correspond. They, also, are too
large. The Mount of Venus, here at the base of the thumb, is excessively
developed, and indicates capacity for gentleness, for chivalry, for
tenderness and love. The Mount of the Moon is small. That is good. There
will be no disturbance of the brain, no propensity towards lunacy. Mars
is not excessive, but it is strong, and he will be bold and courageous,
but not quarrelsome."

The pleasant murmur of the voice, the gentle pressure of her hand, her
nearness and her beauty, had rendered the Quaker absolutely oblivious to
her words.

"Let me now examine the lines," she continued. "Here is the line of the
heart. It passes clear across the palm. It is well marked at every point
and is most pronounced upon the upper side. The love will not be a
sensual passion, but look! it is joined to the head below the finger of
Saturn. It is the sign of a violent death! Heavens!"

As she uttered this exclamation, she pressed the hand convulsively
between her own, and looked up into his face.

The involuntary and sudden action recalled him to his consciousness.
"What did you say?" he asked.

"Have you not been listening?" she replied, repressing both her anxiety
and her annoyance.

"No; was it a good story or a bad one which you were reading?"

"It was both."

"Well--it is no matter, those accidental marks can have no
significance."

"Do you think so?"

"I am sure."

"You do not believe in any signs?"

"None."

"You know that the traveler on the desert told the Bedouin that he did
not, and yet from the foot prints of the camels the Bedouin deciphered
the whole history of a caravan."

Astonished at her reply, David did not answer.

"And then, you know," she continued, "there are the weather signs."

"Yes--that is so."

"And what are the letters of a book but signs?"

"You are right again."

"And is not hardness a sign of something in a stone, and heat of
something in fire? And are not deeds the sign of some quality in a man's
soul, and the expressions of his face signs of emotions of his heart?"

"They are."

"So that by his gait and gestures each man says: 'I am a farmer--a
quack--a Quaker--a soldier--a priest'?"

"This, too, is true."

"Why, then, should not the character and destiny of the man disclose
itself in signs and marks upon his hands?"

David was too much astonished by these words to answer. They revealed a
mental power which he had not even suspected her of possessing. He
discovered that while she was as ignorant as a child in the realms of
thought to which she had been unaccustomed, in her sphere of experience
and reflection she was both shrewd and deep.

"You have thought much about this matter," he said.

"Too much, perhaps."

"It is deeper than I knew."

"And so is everything deeper than we know. Tell me, if you can, why it
is that having met you I have lost faith in my art, and having met me
you have lost faith in your religion."

"It is strange."

"Something must be true. Do you not think so?"

"I have begun to doubt it."

"I believe that what _you_ said is true."

As they stood thus confronting each other, they would have presented a
study of equal interest to the artist or to the philosopher. There was
both a poem and a picture in their attitude. Grace and beauty revealed
themselves on every feature and in every movement. They had arrived at
one of those dramatic points in their life-journey, where all the tragic
elements of existence seem to converge. Agitated by incomprehensible and
delicious emotions, confronting insoluble problems, longing, hoping,
fearing, they hovered over the ocean of life like two tiny sparrows
swept out to sea by a tempest.

The familiar objects and landmarks had all vanished. As children rise in
the morning to find the chalk lines, inside of which they had played
their game of "hop-scotch," washed out by the rain, they had awakened to
find that the well known pathways and barriers over which and within
which they had been accustomed to move had all been obliterated. They
had nothing to guide them and nothing to restrain them except what was
written in their hearts, and this mysterious hieroglyph they had not yet
learned to decipher.

They were awakened from their reveries by the footsteps of the quack,
and by his raucous voice summoning them back into the world of realities
from which they had withdrawn so completely.

"Well, little wife," he said, "how is b-b-business?"

"Fair," she said, gathering up a double hand-full of change and passing
it over to him indifferently.

The question fell upon the ears of the Quaker like a thunder bolt. It
was to him the first intimation that Pepeeta was not the daughter of the
quack. "His wife!" The heart of the youth sank in his bosom. Here was a
new and unexpected complication. What should he do? It was too late to
turn back now. The die had been cast, and he must go forward.

The doctor rattled on with an unceasing flow of talk, while the mind of
the Quaker plunged into a series of violent efforts to adjust itself to
this new situation. He tried to force himself to be glad that he had
been mistaken. He for the first time fully admitted the significance of
the qualms which he felt at permitting himself to regard this strolling
gypsy with such feelings as had been in his heart.

"But now," he said to himself, "I can go forward with less compunction.
I can gratify my desire for excitement and adventure with perfect
safety. I will stay with them for a while, and when I am tired can leave
them without any entanglements." When the situation had been regarded
for a little while from this point of view, he felt happier and more
care-free than for weeks. He solaced his disappointment with the
reflection that he should still be near Pepeeta, but no longer in any
danger.

At this profound reflection of the young moth hovering about the flame,
let the satirist dip his pen in acid, and the pessimist in gall! There
is enough folly and stupidity in the operations of the human mind to
provoke the one to contempt and the other to despair.

The cuttle-fish throws out an inky substance to conceal itself from its
enemies; but the soul ejects an opaque vapor in which to hide from
itself! In this mist of hallucination which rises and envelopes us, the
whole appearance of life alters. Passion and desire repress the judgment
and pervert the conscience. Conclusions that are illogical, expectations
that are irrational and confidences that are groundless to the most
final and fatal absurdity seem as natural and reasonable as intuitions.

It is not in human nature to escape this perversion of thought and
feeling under the stress of temptation. One may as well try to prevent
the rise of temperature in the blood in the rage of fever. There are
times when even the upright in heart must withdraw to the safe covert
of the inner sanctuary and there fervently put up the master prayer of
the soul, "Lord, lead me not into temptation!" But if necessity or duty
calls them out into the midst of life's dangers, let them remember that
what they feel in the calm retreat, is not what will surge through their
disordered intellects and their bounding pulses when they come within
the reach of those fearful fascinations!

It was such a prayer that David had need of when he gave his hand to the
gypsy.




CHAPTER XIII.

FOUND WANTING

     "How oft the sight of means to do ill deeds makes ill deeds
     done!"--King John.

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