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Idolatry: A Romance

by Julian Hawthorne · English · Gutenberg #16283 · 473,321 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Idolatry: A Romance

Author: Julian Hawthorne


        
Release date: July 13, 2005 [eBook #16283]
                Most recently updated: December 12, 2020

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/16283

Credits: Produced by Wright American Fiction, J.N. Goslee and the
        Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK IDOLATRY: A ROMANCE ***




Produced by Wright American Fiction, J.N. Goslee and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net





IDOLATRY:

_A ROMANCE_.


by

JULIAN HAWTHORNE.




BOSTON:
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY,
LATE TICKNOR & FIELDS, AND FIELDS, OSGOOD, & CO.
1874.

University Press: Welch, Bigelow, & Co.,
Cambridge.


CONTENTS


Dedication

I. The Enchanted Ring

II. Out of Egypt

III. A May Morning

IV. A Brahman

V. A New Man with an old Face

VI. The Vagaries of Helwyse

VII. A Quarrel

VIII. A Collision Imminent

IX. The Voice of Darkness

X. Helwyse Resists the Devil

XI. A Dead Weight

XII. More Vagaries

XIII. Through a Glass

XIV. The Tower of Babel

XV. Charon's Ferry

XVI. Legend and Chronicle

XVII. Face to Face

XVIII. The Hoopoe and the Crocodile

XIX. Before Sundown

XX. Between Waking and Sleeping

XXI. We Pick Up Another Thread

XXII. Heart and Head

XXIII. Balder Tells an Untruth

XXIV. Uncle Hiero at Last

XXV. The Happiness of Man

XXVI. Music and Madness

XXVII. Peace and Good-will

XXVIII. Betrothal

XXIX. A Chamber of the Heart

XXX. Dandelions

XXXI. Married

XXXII. Shut In

XXXIII. The Black Cloud




DEDICATION

To ROBERT CARTER, ESQ.


Not the intrinsic merits of this story embolden me to inscribe it to
you, my dear friend, but the fact that you, more than any other man,
are responsible for its writing. Your advice and encouragement first
led me to book-making; so it is only fair that you should partake of
whatever obloquy (or honor) the practice may bring upon me.

The ensuing pages may incline you to suspect their author of a
repugnance to unvarnished truth; but,--without prejudice to
Othello,--since varnish brings out in wood veins of beauty invisible
before the application, why not also in the sober facts of life? When
the transparent artifice has been penetrated, the familiar substance
underneath will be greeted none the less kindly; nay, the observer
will perhaps regard the disguise as an oblique compliment to his
powers of insight, and his attention may thus be better secured than
had the subject worn its every-day dress. Seriously, the most
matter-of-fact life has moods when the light of romance seems to gild
its earthen chimney-pots into fairy minarets; and, were the
story-teller but sure of laying his hands upon the true gold, perhaps
the more his story had of it, the better.

Here, however, comes in the grand difficulty; fact nor fancy is often
reproduced in true colors; and while attempting justly to combine
life's elements, the writer has to beware that they be not mere cheap
imitations thereof. Not seldom does it happen that what he proffers as
genuine arcana of imagination and philosophy affects the reader as a
dose of Hieroglyphics and Balderdash. Nevertheless, the first duty of
the fiction-monger--no less than of the photographic artist doomed to
produce successful portraits of children-in-arms--is, to be amusing;
to shrink at no shifts which shall beguile the patient into
procrastinating escape until the moment be gone by. The gentle reader
will not too sternly set his face against such artifices, but, so they
go not the length of fantastically presenting phenomena inexplicable
upon any common-sense hypothesis, he will rather lend himself to his
own beguilement. The performance once over, let him, if so inclined,
strip the feathers from the flights of imagination, and wash the color
from the incidents; if aught save the driest and most ordinary matters
of fact reward his researches, then let him be offended!

_De te fabula_ does not apply here, my dear friend; for you will show
me more indulgence than I have skill to demand. And should you find
matter of interest in this book, yours, rather than the author's, will
be the merit. As the beauty of nature is from the eye that looks upon
her, so would the story be dull and barren, save for the life and
color of the reader's sympathy.

Yours most sincerely,

JULIAN HAWTHORNE.




IDOLATRY




I.

THE ENCHANTED RING.


One of the most imposing buildings in Boston twenty years ago was a
granite hotel, whose western windows looked upon a graveyard. Passing
up a flight of steps, and beneath a portico of dignified granite
columns, and so through an embarrassing pair of swinging-doors to the
roomy vestibule,--you would there pause a moment to spit upon the
black-and-white tessellated pavement. Having thus asserted your title
to Puritan ancestry, and to the best accommodations the house
afforded, you would approach the desk and write your name in the hotel
register. This done, you would be apt to run your eye over the last
dozen arrivals, on the chance of lighting upon the autograph of some
acquaintance, to be shunned or sought according to circumstances.

Let us suppose, for the story's sake, that such was the gentle
reader's behavior on a certain night during the latter part of May,
in the year eighteen hundred and fifty-three. If now he will turn to
the ninety-ninth page of the register above mentioned, he will remark
that the last name thereon written is, "Doctor Hiero Glyphic. Room
27." The natural inference is that, unless so odd a name be an assumed
one, Doctor Glyphic occupies that room. Passing on to page one
hundred, he will find the first entry reads as follows "Balder
Helwyse, Cosmopolis. Room 29."

In no trifling mood do we call attention to these two names, and,
above all, to their relative position in the book. Had they both
appeared upon the same page, this romance might never have been
written. On such seemingly frail pegs hang consequences the most
weighty. Because Doctor Glyphic preferred the humble foot of the
ninety-ninth page to the trouble of turning to a leading position on
the one hundredth; because Mr. Helwyse, having begun the one hundredth
page, was too incurious to find out who was his next-door neighbor on
the ninety-ninth, ensued unparalleled adventures, and this account of
them.

Our present purpose, by the reader's leave, and in his company, is to
violate Doctor Hiero Glyphic's retirement, as he lies asleep in bed.
Nor shall we stop at his bedside; we mean to penetrate deep into the
darksome caves of his memory, and to drag forth thence sundry
odd-looking secrets, which shall blink and look strangely in the
light of discovery;--little thought their keeper that our eyes should
ever behold them! Yet will he not resent our, intrusion; it is twenty
years ago,--and he lies asleep.

Two o'clock sounds from the neighboring steeple of the Old South
Church, as we noiselessly enter the chamber,--noiselessly, for the
hush of the past is about us. We scarcely distinguish anything at
first; the moon has set on the other side of the hotel, and perhaps,
too, some of the dimness of those twenty intervening years affects our
eyesight. By degrees, however, objects begin to define themselves; the
bed shows doubtfully white, and that dark blot upon the pillow must be
the face of our sleeping man. It is turned towards the window; the
mouth is open; probably the good Doctor is snoring, albeit, across
this distance of time, the sound fails to reach us.

The room is as bare, square, and characterless as other hotel rooms;
nevertheless, its occupant may have left a hint or two of himself
about, which would be of use to us. There are no trunks or other
luggage; evidently he will be on his way again to-morrow. The window
is shut, although the night is warm and clear. The door is carefully
locked. The Doctor's garments, which appear to be of rather a jaunty
and knowing cut, are lying disorderly about, on chair, table, or
floor. He carries no watch; but under his pillow we see protruding
the corner of a great leathern pocket-book, which might contain a
fortune in bank-notes.

A couple of chairs are drawn up to the bedside, upon one of which
stands a blown-out candle; the other supports an oblong, coffin-shaped
box, narrower at one end than at the other, and painted black. Too
small for a coffin, however; no human corpse, at least, is contained
in it. But the frame that lies so quiet and motionless here, thrills,
when awaked to life, with a soul only less marvellous than man's. In
short, the coffin is a violin-case, and the mysterious frame the
violin. The Doctor must have been fiddling overnight, after getting
into bed; to the dissatisfaction, perhaps, of his neighbor on the
other side of the partition.

Little else in the room is worthy notice, unless it be the pocket-comb
which has escaped from the Doctor's waistcoat, and the shaving
materials (also pocketable) upon the wash-stand. Apparently our friend
does not stand upon much toilet ceremony. The room has nothing more of
significance to say to us; so now we come to the room's occupant. Our
eyes have got enough accustomed to the imperfect light to discern what
manner of man he may be.

Barely middle-aged; or, at a second glance, he might be fifteen to
twenty-five years older. His face retains the form of youth, yet wears
a subtile shadow which we feel might be consistent even with extreme
old age. The forehead is wide and low, supported by regular eyebrows;
the face beneath long and narrow, of a dark and dry complexion. In
sleep, open-mouthed, the expression is rather inane; though we can
readily imagine the waking face to be not devoid of a certain
intensity and comeliness of aspect, marred, however, by an air of
guarded anxiety which is apparent even now.

We prattle of the dead past, and use to fancy that peace must dwell
there, if nothing else. Only in the past, say we, is security from
jostle, danger, and disturbance; who would live at his ease must
number his days backwards; no charm so potent as the years, if read
from right to left. Living in the past, prophecy and memory are at
one; care for the future can harass no man. Throw overboard that
Jonah, Time, and the winds of fortune shall cease to buffet us. And
more to the same effect.

And yet it is not so. The past, if more real than the future, is no
less so than the present; the pain of a broken heart or head is never
annihilated, but becomes part and parcel of eternity. This uneasy
snorer here, for instance: his earthly troubles have been over years
ago, yet, as our fancy sees him, he is none the calmer or the happier
for that. Observe him, how he mumbles inarticulately, and makes
strengthless clutchings at the blanket with his long, slender fingers.

But we delay too long over the external man, seeing that our avowed
business is with the internal. A sleeping man is truly a helpless
creature. They say that, if you take his hand in yours and ask him
questions, he has no other choice than to answer--or to awake. The
Doctor--as we know by virtue of the prophetic advantages just remarked
upon--will stay asleep for some hours yet. Or, if you are clairvoyant,
you have but to fall in a trance, and lay a hand on his forehead, and
you may read off his thoughts,--provided he does his thinking in his
head. But the world is growing too wise, nowadays, to put faith in old
woman's nonsense like this. Again, there is--or used to be--an odd
theory that all matter is a sort of photographic plate, whereon is
registered, had we but eyes to read it, the complete history of
itself. What an invaluable pair of eyes were that! In vain, arraigned
before them, would the criminal deny his guilt, the lover the soft
impeachment. The whole scene would stand forth, photographed in fatal
minuteness and indelibility upon face, hands, coat-sleeve,
shirt-bosom. Mankind would be its own book of life, written in the
primal hieroglyphic character,--the language understood by all. Vocal
conversation would become obsolete, unless among a few superior
persons able to discuss abstract ideas.

We speak of these things only to smile at them; far be it from us to
insult the reader's understanding by asking him to regard them
seriously. But story-tellers labor under one disadvantage which is
peculiar to their profession,--the necessity of omniscience. This
tends to make them top arbitrary, leads them to disregard the modesty
of nature and the harmonies of reason in their methods. They will
pretend to know things which they never could have seen or heard of,
and for the truth of which they bring forward no evidence; thus
forcing the reader to reject, as lacking proper confirmation, what he
would else, from its inherent grace or sprightliness, be happy to
accept.

That we shall be free from this reproach is rather our good fortune
than our merit. It is by favor of our stars, not by virtue of our own,
that we turn not aside from the plain path of truth to the by-ways of
supernaturalism and improbability. Yet we refrain with difficulty from
a breath of self-praise; there is a proud and solid satisfaction in
holding an unassailable position could we but catch the world's eye,
we would meet it calmly!

Let us hasten to introduce our talisman. You may see it at this very
moment, encircling the third finger of Doctor Glyphic's left hand; in
fact, it is neither more nor less than a quaint diamond ring. The
stone, though not surprisingly large, is surpassingly pure and
brilliant; as its keen, delicate ray sparkles on the eye, one marvels
whence, in the dead of night, it got together so much celestial fire.
Observe the setting; the design is unique. Two fairy serpents--one
golden, the other fashioned from black meteoric iron--are intertwined
along their entire length, forming the hoop of the ring. Their heads
approach the diamond from opposite sides, and each makes a mighty bite
at it with his tiny jaws, studded with sharp little teeth. Thus their
contest holds the stone firmly in place. The whole forms a pretty
symbol of the human soul, battled for by the good and the evil
principles. But the diamond seems, in its entirety, to be an awkward
mouthful for either. The snakes are wrought with marvellous dexterity
and finish; each separate scale is distinguishable upon their
glistening bodies, the wrinkling of the skin in the coils, the
sparkling points of eyes, and the minute nostrils. Such works of art
are not made nowadays; the ring is an antique,--a relic of an age when
skill was out of all proportion to liberty,--a very distant time
indeed. To deserve such a setting, the stone must have exceptional
qualities. Let us take a closer look at it.

Fortunately, its own lustre makes it visible in every part; the
minuteness of our scrutiny need be limited only by our power of eye.
It is cut with many facets,--twenty-seven, if you choose to count
them; perhaps (though we little credit such fantasies) some mystic
significance may be intended in this number. Concentrating now our
attention upon any single facet, we see--either inscribed upon its
surface, or showing through from the interior of the stone--a sort of
monogram, or intricately designed character, not unlike the mysterious
Chinese letters on tea-chests. Every facet has a similar figure,
though no two are identical. But the central, the twenty-seventh
facet, which is larger than the others, has an important peculiarity.
Looking upon it, we find therein, concentrated and commingled, the
other twenty-six characters; which, separately unintelligible, form,
when thus united, a simple and consistent narrative, equivalent in
extent to many hundred printed pages, and having for subject nothing
less than the complete history of the ring itself.

Some small portion of this narrative--that, namely, which relates more
particularly to the present wearer of the ring--we will glance at; the
rest must be silence, although, going back as it does to the earliest
records of the human race, many an interesting page must be skipped
perforce.

The advantages to a historian of a medium such as this are too patent
to need pointing out. Pretension and conjecture will be avoided,
because unnecessary. The most trifling thought or deed of any person
connected with the history of the ring is laid open to direct
inspection. Were there more such talismans as this, the profession of
authorship would become no less easy than delightful, and criticism
would sting itself to death, in despair of better prey. So far as is
known, however, the enchanted ring is unique of its kind, and, such as
it is, is not likely to become common property.




II.

OUT OF EGYPT.


But the small hours of the morning are slipping away; we must construe
our hieroglyphics without further palaver. The sleeper lies upon his
side, his left hand resting near his face upon the pillow. Were he to
move it ever so little during our examination, the history of years
might be thrown into confusion. Nevertheless, we shall hope to touch
upon all the more important points, and in some cases to go into
details.

Concentrating our attention upon the central facet, its clear ray
strikes the imagination, and forthwith transports us to a distant age
and climate. The air is full of lazy warmth. A full-fed river,
glassing the hot blue sky, slides in long curves through a low-lying,
illimitable plain. The rich earth, green with mighty crops, everywhere
exhales upward the quivering heat of her breath. An indolent,
dark-skinned race, turbaned and scantly clothed, move through the
meadows, splash in the river, and rest beneath the palm-trees, which
meet in graceful clusters here and there, as if striving to get
beneath one another's shadow. Dirty villages swarm and babble on the
river's brink.

Were there leisure to listen, the diamond could readily relate the
whole history of this famous valley. For the stone was fashioned to
its present shape while the thought that formed the Pyramids was yet
unborn, and while the limestone and granite whereof they are built lay
in their silent beds, dreaming, perchance, of airy days before the
deluge, long ere the heated vapors stiffened into stone. Some great
patriarch of early days, founder of a race called by his name, picked
up this diamond in the southern desert, and gave it its present form;
perhaps, also, breathed into it the marvellous historical gift which
it retains to this day. Who was that primal man? how sounded his
voice? were his eyes terrible, or mild? Seems, as we speak, we glimpse
his majestic figure, and the grandeur of his face and cloudy beard.

He passed away, but the enchanted stone remained, and has sparkled
along the splendid march of successive dynasties, and has reflected
men and cities which to us are nameless, or but a half-deciphered
name. It has seen the mystic ceremonies of Egyptian priests, and
counts their boasted wisdom as a twice-told tale. It has watched the
unceasing toil of innumerable slaves, piling up through many ardent
years the idle tombs of kings. It has beheld vast winding lengths of
processions darken and glitter across the plain, slowly devoured by
the shining city, or issuing from her gates like a monstrous birth.

But whither wander we? Standing in this hotel of modern Boston, we
must confine our inquiries to a far later epoch than the Pharaohs'.
Step aside, and let the old history sweep past, like the turbid and
eddying current of the mysterious Nile; forbearing to launch our skiff
earlier than at the beginning of the present century.

The middle of June, eighteen hundred and sixteen: the river is just
beginning to rise, and the thirsty land spreads wide her lap to
receive him. Some miles to the north slumbers Cairo in white heat, its
outline jagged with minarets and bulbous domes. Southward, the shaded
Pyramids print their everlasting outlines against the tremulous
distance; old as they are, it seems as though a puff of the Khamsin
might dissolve them away. Near at hand is a noisy, naked crowd of men
and boys, plunging and swimming in the water, or sitting and standing
along the bank. They are watching and discussing the slow approach up
stream of a large boat with a broad lateen-sail, and a strange flag
fluttering from the mast-head. Rumor says that this boat contains a
company of strangers from beyond the sea; men who do not wear turbans,
whose dress is close-fitting, and covers them from head to
foot,--even the legs. They come to learn wisdom and civilization from
the Pyramids, and among the ruins of Memphis.

A hundred yards below this shouting, curious crowd, stands, waist-deep
in the Nile, a slender-limbed boy, about ten years old. He belongs to
a superior caste, and holds himself above the common rabble. Being
perfectly naked, a careless eye might, however, rank him with the
rest, were it not for the talisman which he wears suspended to a fine
gold chain round his neck; a curiously designed diamond ring, the
inheritance of a long line of priestly ancestors. The boy's face is
certainly full of intelligence, and the features are finely moulded
for so young a lad.

He also is watching the upward progress of the lateen-sail; has heard,
moreover, the report concerning those on board. He wonders where is
the country from which they come. Is it the land the storks fly to, of
which mother (before the plague carried both her and father to a
stranger land still) used to tell such wonderful stories? Does the
world really extend far beyond the valley? Is the world all valley and
river, with now and then some hills, like those away up beyond
Memphis? Are there other cities beside Cairo, and that one which he
has heard of but never seen,--Alexandria? Wonders why the strangers
dress in tight-fitting clothes, with leg-coverings, and without
turbans! Would like to find out about all these things,--about all
things knowable beside these, if any there be. Would like to go back
with the strangers to their country, when they return, and so become
the wisest and most powerful of his race; wiser even than those
fabulously learned priestly instructors of his, who are so strict with
him. Perhaps he might find all his forefathers there, and his kind
mother, who used to tell him stories.

Bah! how the sun blisters down on head and shoulders: will take a dive
and a swim,--a short swim only, not far from shore; for was not the
priest telling of a boy caught by a great crocodile, only, a few days
ago, and never seen since? But there is no crocodile near to-day; and,
besides, will not his precious talisman keep him from all harm?

The subtile Nile catches him softly in his cool arms, dandles him,
kisses Him, flatters him, wooes him imperceptibly onwards. Now he is
far from shore, and the multitudinous feet of the current are hurrying
him away. The slow-moving boat is much nearer than it was a minute
ago,--seems to be rasping towards him, in spite of the laziness of the
impelling breeze. The boy, as yet unconscious of his peril, now
glances shorewards, and sees the banks wheel past. The crowd of
bathers is already far beyond hearing yet, frightened and tired, he
wastes his remaining strength in fruitless shouts. Now the deceitful
eddies, once so soft and friendly, whirl him down in ruthless
exultation. He will never reach the shore, good swimmer though he be!

Hark! what plunged from the bank,--what black thing moves towards him
across the water? The crocodile! coming with tears in his eyes, and a
long grin of serried teeth. Coming!--the ugly scaly head is always
nearer and nearer. The boy screams; but who should hear him? He feels
whether the talisman be yet round his neck. He screams again, calling,
in half-delirium, upon his dead mother. Meanwhile the scaly snout is
close upon him.

A many-voiced shout, close at hand; a splashing of poles in the water;
a rippling of eddies against a boat's bows! As the boy drifts by, a
blue-eyed, yellow-bearded viking swings himself from the halyard,
catches him, pulls him aboard with a jerk and a shout, safe! The long
grin snaps emptily together behind him. The boy lies on the deck, a
vision of people with leg-coverings and other oddities of costume
swimming in his eyes; one of them supports his head on his knee, and
bends over him a round, good-natured, spectacled face. Above, a
beautiful flag, striped and starred with white, blue, and red, flaps
indolently against the mast.--

Precisely at this point the sleeper stirs his hand slightly, but
enough to throw the record of several succeeding years into
uncertainty and confusion. Here and there, however, we catch imperfect
glimpses of the Egyptian lad, steadily growing up to be a tall young
man. He is dressed in European clothes, and lives and moves amid
civilized surroundings: Egypt, with her pyramids, palms, and river, we
see no more. The priest's son seems now to be immersed in studies; he
shows a genius for music and painting, and is diligently storing his
mind with other than Egyptian lore. With him, or never far away, we
meet a man considerably older than the student,--good-natured,
whimsical, round of head and face and insignificant of feature.
Towards him does the student observe the profoundest deference, bowing
before him, and addressing him as "Master Hiero," or "Master Glyphic."
Master Hiero, for his part, calls the Egyptian "Manetho"; from which
we might infer his descent from the celebrated historian of that name,
but will not insist upon this genealogy. As for the studies, from
certain signs we fancy them tending towards theology; the descendant
of Egyptian priests is to become a Christian clergyman! Nevertheless,
he still wears his talismanic ring. Does he believe it saved him from
the crocodile? Does his Christian enlightenment not set him free from
such superstition?

So much we piece together from detached glimpses; but now, as the
magic ray steadies once more, things become again distinct. Judging
from the style and appointments of Master Hiero Glyphic's house, he is
a wealthy man, and eccentric as well. It is full of strange
incongruities and discords; beauties in abundance, but ill harmonized.
One half the house is built like an Egyptian temple, and is enriched
with many spoils from the valley of the Nile; and here a secret
chamber is set apart for Manetho; its very existence is known to no
one save himself and Master Hiero. He spends much of his time here,
meditating and working amidst his books and papers, playing on his
violin, or leaning idly back in his chair, watching the sunlight,
through the horizontal aperture high above, his head, creep stealthily
across the opposite wall.

But these saintly and scholarly reveries are disturbed anon. Master
Hiero, though a bachelor, has a half-sister, a pale, handsome,
indolent young woman, with dark hair and eyes, and a rather haughty
manner. Helen appears, and thenceforth the household lives and
breathes according to her languid bidding. Manetho comes out of his
retirement, and dances reverential attendance upon her. He is
twenty-five years old, now; tall, slender, and far from ill-looking,
with his dark, narrow eyes, wide brows, and tapering face. His manners
are gentle, subdued, insinuating, and altogether he seems to please
Helen; she condescends to him,--more than condescends, perhaps.
Meantime, alas! there is a secret opposition in progress, embodied in
the shapely person of that bright-eyed gypsy of a girl whom her
mistress Helen calls Salome. There is no question as to Salome's
complete subjection to the attractions of the young embryo clergyman;
she pursues him with eyes and heart, and seeing him by Helen's side,
she is miserably but dumbly jealous.

How is this matter to end? Manetho's devotion to Helen seems
unwavering; yet sometimes it is hard not to suspect a secret
understanding between him and Salome. He has ceased to wear his ring,
and once we caught a diamond-sparkle from beneath the thick folds of
lace which cover Helen's bosom; but, on the other hand, we fear his
arm has been round the gypsy's graceful waist, and that she has learnt
the secret of the private chamber. Is demure Manetho a flirt, or do
his affections and his ambition run counter to each other? Helen would
bring him the riches of this world,--but what should a clergyman care
for such vanities?--while Salome, to our thinking, is far the
prettier, livelier, and more attractive woman of the two. Brother
Hiero, whimsical and preoccupied, sees nothing of what is going on. He
is an antiquary,--an Egyptologist, and thereto his soul is wedded. He
has no eyes nor ears for the loves of other people for one another.--

Provoking! The uneasy sleeper has moved again, and disorganized,
beyond remedy, the events of a whole year. Judging from such fragments
as reach us, it must have been a momentous epoch in our history. From
the beginning, a handsome, stalwart, blue-eyed man, with a great beard
like a sheaf of straw, shoulders upon the scene, and thenceforth
becomes inextricably mixed up with dark-eyed Helen. We recognize in
him an old acquaintance; he was on the lateen-sailed boat that went up
the Nile; it was he who swung himself from the vessel's side, and
pulled Manetho out of the jaws of death,--a fact, by the way, of which
Manetho remained ignorant until his dying day. With this new arrival,
Helen's supremacy in the household ends. Thor--so they call
him--involuntarily commands her, and so her subjects. Against him, the
Reverend Manetho has not the ghost of a chance. To his credit is it
that he conceals whatever emotions of disappointment or jealousy he
might be supposed to feel, and is no less winning towards Thor than
towards the rest of the world. But is it possible that the talisman
still hides in Helen's bosom? Does the conflict which it symbolizes
beset her heart?

The enchanted mirror is still again, and a curious scene is reflected
from it. A large and lofty room, windowless, lit by flaring lamps hung
at intervals round the walls; the panels contain carvings in
bas-relief of Egyptian emblems and devices; columns surround the
central space, their capitals carved with the lotos-flower, their
bases planted amidst papyrus leaves. A border of hieroglyphic
inscription encircles the walls, just beneath the ceiling. In each
corner of the room rests a red granite sarcophagus, and between each
pair of pillars stands a mummy in its wooden case. At that end
farthest from the low-browed doorway--which is guarded by two great
figures of Isis and Osiris, sitting impassive, with hands on knees--is
raised an altar of black marble, on which burns some incense. The
perfumed smoke, wavering upwards, mingles with that of the lamps
beneath the high ceiling. The prevailing color is ruddy Indian-red,
relieved by deep blue and black, while brighter tints show here and
there. Blocks of polished stone pave the floor, and dimly reflect the
lights.

In front of the altar stands a ministerial figure,--none other than
Manetho, who must have taken orders,--and joins together, in holy
matrimony, the yellow-bearded Thor and the dark-haired Helen. Master
Hiero, his round, snub-nosed face red with fussy emotion, gives the
bride away; while Salome, dressed in white and looking very pretty and
lady-like, does service as bridesmaid,--such is her mistress's whim.
She seems in even better spirits than the pale bride, and her black
eyes scarcely wander from the minister's rapt countenance.

But a few hours later, when bride and groom are gone, Salome,--who,
on some plausible pretext of, her own, has been allowed to remain with
brother Hiero until her mistress returns from the wedding-tour,---
Salome appears in the secret chamber, where the Reverend Manetho sits
with his head between his hands. We will not look too closely at this
interview. There are words fierce and tender, tears and pleadings,
feverish caresses, incoherent promises, distrustful bargains; and it
is late before they part. Salome passes out through the great
tomb-like hall, where all the lamps save one are burnt out; and the
young minister remains to pursue his holy meditations alone.

We are too discreet to meddle with the honeymoon; but, passing over
some eight months, behold the husband and wife returned, to plume
their wings ere taking the final flight. Another strange scene
attracts us here.

The dusk of a summer evening. Helen, with a more languid step and air
than before marriage, saunters along a path through the trees, some
distance from the house. She is clad in loose-flowing drapery, and has
thrown a white shawl over her head and shoulders. Reaching a bench of
rustic woodwork, she drops weariedly down upon it.

Manetho comes out all at once, and stands before her; he seems to have
darkened together from the shadow of the surrounding trees. Perhaps a
little startled at his so abrupt appearance, she opens her eyes with a
wondering haughtiness; but, at the same time, the light pressure of
the enchanted ring against her bosom feels like a dull sting, and her
heart beats uncomfortably. He begins to speak in his usual tone of
softest deference; he sits down by her, and now she is paler, glances
anxiously up the path for her delaying husband, and the hand that
lifts her handkerchief to her lips trembles a little. Is it at his
words? or at their tone? or at what she sees lurking behind his dusky
eyes, curdling beneath his thin, dark skin, quivering down to the tips
of his long, slender fingers?

All in a moment he bursts forth, without warning, without restraint,
the fire of the Egyptian sun boiling in his blood and blazing in his
passion. He seizes her soft white wrist,--then her waist; he presses
against his, her bosom,--what a throbbing!--her cheek to his,--how
aghast! He pours hot words in torrents into her ears,--all that his
fretting heart has hoarded up and brooded over these months and years!
all,--sparing her not a thought, not a passionate word. She tries to
repel him, to escape, to scream for help; but he looks down her eyes
with his own, holds her fast, and she gasps for breath. So the serpent
coils about the dove, and stamps his image upon her bewildered brain.

Verily, the Reverend Manetho has much forgotten himself. The issue
might have been disastrous, had not Helen, in the crisis of the
affair, lost consciousness, and fallen a dead weight in his arms. He
laid her gently on the bench, fumbled for a moment in the bosom of her
dress, and drew out the diamond ring. Just then is heard the solid
step of Thor, striding and whistling along the path. Manetho snaps the
golden chain, and vanishes with his talisman; and he is the first to
appear, full of sympathy and concern, when the distracted husband
shouts for help.

Next morning, two little struggling human beings are blinking and
crying in a darkened room, and there is no mother to give them milk,
and cherish them in her bosom. There sits the father, almost as still
and cold as what was his wife. She did not speak to him, nor seem to
know him, to the last. He will never know the truth; Manetho comes and
goes, and reads the burial-service, unsuspected and unpunished. But
Salome follows him away from the grave, and some words pass between
them. The man is no longer what he was. He turns suddenly upon her and
strikes out with savage force; the diamond on his finger bites into
the flesh of the gypsy's breast; she will carry the scar of that
brutal blow as long as she lives. So he drove his only lover away, and
looked upon her bright, handsome face no more.

Here Doctor Glyphic--or whoever this sleeping man may be--turns
heavily upon his face, drawing his hand, with the blood-stained ring,
out of sight. We are glad to leave him to his bad dreams; the air
oppresses us. Come, 't is time we were off. The eastern horizon bows
before the sun, the air colors delicate pink, and the very tombstones
in the graveyard blush for sympathy. The sparrows have been awake for
a half-hour past, and, up aloft, the clouds, which wander ceaselessly
over the face of the earth, alighting only on lonely mountain-tops,
are tinted into rainbow-quarries by the glorious spectacle.




III.

A MAY MORNING.


King Arthur, in his Bohemian days, carried an adamantine shield, the
gift of some fairy relative. Not only was it impenetrable, but, so
intolerable was its lustre, it overthrew all foes before the lance's
point could reach them. Observing this, the chivalric monarch had a
cover made for it, which he never removed save in the face of
superhuman odds.

Here is an analogy. The imaginative reader may look upon our enchanted
facet-mirror as too glaringly simple and direct a source of facts to
suit the needs of a professed romance. Be there left, he would say,
some room for fancy, and even for conjecture. Let the author seem
occasionally to consult with his companion, gracefully to defer to his
judgment. Bare statement, the parade of indisputable evidence, is well
enough in law, but appears ungentle in a work of fiction.

How just is this mild censure! how gladly are its demands conceded!
Let dogmatism retire, and blossom, flowers of fancy, on your yielding
stems! Henceforward the reader is our confidential counsellor. We
will pretend that our means of information are no better than other
writers'. We will uniformly revel in speculation, and dally with
imaginative delights; and only when hard pressed for the true path
will we snatch off the veil, and let forth for a moment a redeeming
ray.

In this generous mood, we pass through the partition between No. 27
and No. 29. In the matter of bedchambers--even hotelbedchambers--there
can be great diversity. That we were in just now was close and
unwholesome, and wore an air of feverishness and disorder. Here, on
the contrary, the air is fresh and brisk, for the breeze from Boston
harbor--slightly flavored, it is true, by its journey across the
northern part of the city--has been blowing into the room all night
long. Here are some trunks and carpet-bags, well bepasted with the
names of foreign towns and countries, famous and infamous. One of the
trunks is a bathing-tub, fitted with a cover--an agreeable promise of
refreshment amidst the dust and weariness of travel. A Russia-leather
travelling-bag lies open on the table, disgorging an abundant armament
of brushes and combs and various toilet niceties. Mr. Helwyse must be
a dandy.

Cheek by jowl with the haversack lies a cylindrical case of the same
kind of leather, with a strap attached, to sling over the shoulder.
This, perhaps, contains a telescope. It would not be worth mentioning,
save that our prophetic vision sees it coming into use by and by. Not
to analyze too closely, everything in this room speaks of life,
health, and movement. In spite of smallness, bareness, and angularity,
it is fit for a May morning to enter, and expand to full-grown day.

It is now about half past four, and the crisp new sunshine, just above
ground, has clambered over the window-sill, taken a flying leap across
the narrow floor, and is chuckling full in the agreeable face asleep
upon the pillow. The face, feeling the warmth, and conscious, through
its closed eyelids, of the light, presently stretches its eyebrows,
then blinks, and finally yawns,--Ah--h! Thirty-two even, white teeth,
in perfect order; a great, red, healthy tongue, and a round, mellow
roar, the parting remonstrance of the sleepy god, taking flight for
the day. Thereupon a voice, fetched from some profounder source than
the back of the head,--

"Steward! bring me my--Oh! A land-lubber again, am I!"

Mr. Balder Helwyse now sits up in bed, his hair and beard,--which are
extraordinarily luxuriant, and will be treated at greater length
hereafter,--his hair and beard in the wildest confusion. He stares
about him with a pair of well-opened dark eyes, which contrast
strangely with his fair Northern complexion. Next comes a spasmodic
stretching of arms and legs, a whisking of bedclothes, and a solid
thump of two feet upon the floor. Another survey of the room, ending
with a deep breathing in of the fresh air and an appreciative smack of
the lips.

"O nose, eyes, ears, and all my other godlike senses and faculties!
what a sensation is this of Mother Earth at sunrise! Better, seems to
me, than ocean, beloved of my Scandinavian forefathers. Hear those
birds! look at those divine trees, and the tall moist grass round
them! By my head! living is a glorious business!--What, ho! slave,
empty me here that bath-tub, and then ring the bell."

The slave--a handsome, handy fellow, unusually docile, inseparable
from his master, whose life-long bondsman he was, and so much like him
in many ways (owing, perhaps, to the intimacy always subsisting
between the two), that he had more than once been confounded with
him,--this obedient menial--

No! not even for a moment will we mislead our reader. Are we not sworn
confidants? What is he to think, then, of this abrupt introduction,
unheralded, unexplained? Be it at once confessed that Mr. Helwyse
travelled unattended, that there was no slave or other person of any
kind in the room, and that this high-sounding order of his was a mere
ebullition of his peculiar humor.

He was a philosopher, and was in the habit of making many of his
tenets minister to his amusement, when in his more sportive and genial
moods. Not to exhaust his characteristics too early in the story, it
need only be observed here that he held body and soul distinct, and so
far antagonistic that one or the other must be master; furthermore,
that the soul's supremacy was the more desirable. Whether it were also
invariable and uncontested, there will be opportunity to find out
later. Meantime, this dual condition was productive of not a little
harmless entertainment to Mr. Helwyse, at times when persons less
happily organized would become victims of ennui. Be the conditions
what they might, he was never without a companion, whose ways he knew,
and whom he was yet never weary of questioning and studying. No
subject so dull that its different aspects, as viewed from soul and
from body, would not give it piquancy. No question so trivial that its
discussion on material and on spiritual grounds would not lend it
importance. Nor was any enjoyment so keen as not to be enhanced by the
contrast of its physical with its psychical phase.

Waking up, therefore, on this May morning, and being in a charming
humor, he chose to look upon himself as the proprietor of a
body-servant, and to give his orders with patrician imperiousness. The
obedient menial, then,--to resume the thread,--sprang upon the
tub-trunk, whipped off the lid, and discharged the contents upon the
bed in a twinkling. This done, he stepped to the bell-rope, and lent
it a vigorous jerk, soon answered by a brisk tapping at the door.

"Please, sir, did you ring?"

"Indeed I did, my dear. Are you the pretty chambermaid?"

This bold venture is met by silence, only modified by a low delighted
giggle. Presently,--"Did you want anything, sir, please?"

"Ever so many things, my girl; more than my life is long enough to
tell! First, though, I want to apologize for addressing you from
behind a closed door; but circumstances which I can neither explain
nor overcome forbid my opening it. Next, two pails of the best cold
water at your earliest convenience. Hurry, now, there's a Hebe!"

"Very good, sir," giggles Hebe, retreating down passage.

It is to be supposed that it was the plebeian body-servant that
carried on this unideal conversation, and that the patrician soul had
nothing to do with it. The ability to lay the burden of lapses from
good taste, and other goods, upon the shoulders of the flesh, is
sometimes convenient and comforting.

Balder Helwyse, master and man, turns away from the door, and catches
sight of a white-robed, hairy-headed reflection in the looking-glass,
the phantom face of which at once expands in a genial expression of
mirth; an impalpable arm is outstretched, and the mouth seems thus to
speak:--

"Stick to your bath, my good fellow, and the evil things of this life
shall not get hold of you. Water is like truth,--purifying,
transparent; a tonic to those fouled and wearied with the dust and
vanity of this transitional phenomenon called the world. Patronize it!
be thy acquaintance with it constant and familiar! Remember, my dear
Balder, that this slave of thine is the medium through which something
better than he (thyself, namely) is filtered to the world, and the
world to thee. Go to, then! if the filter be foul, shall not that
which is filtered become unclean also?"

Here the rhetorical phantom was interrupted by the sound of a very
good violin, touched with unusual skill, in the next room. The phantom
vanished, but Mr. Helwyse seated himself softly upon the bed,
listening with full enjoyment to every note; his very toes seeming to
partake of his appreciation. Music is the mysterious power which makes
body and soul--master and man--thrill as one string. The musician
played several bars, beautiful in themselves, but unconnected; and
ever and anon there sounded a discordant note, like a smirch upon a
fair picture. The execution, however, showed a master hand, and the
themes betrayed the soul of a true musician, albeit tainted with some
subtile deformity.

"Heard him last night, and fell asleep, dreaming of a man with the
brain of a devil and an angel's heart.--Drop in on him presently, and
have him down to breakfast. If young, shall be our brother,--so long
as there's anything in him. If--as I partly suspect--old, and a
father, marry his daughter. But no; such a fiddler as he can't be
married, unless unhappily." Mr. Helwyse runs his hands dreamily
through his tangled mane, and shakes it back. If philosophical, he
seems also to be romantic and imaginative, and impressionable by other
personalities. It is, to be sure, unfair to judge a man from such
unconsidered words as he may let fall during the first half-hour after
waking up in the morning; were it otherwise, we should infer that,
although he might take a genuine interest in whomever he meets, it
would be too analytical to last long, except where the vein was a very
rich one. He would pick the kernel out of the nut, but, that done,
would feel no sentimental interest in the shell. Too much of this! and
yet who can help drawing conclusions (and not always incorrectly) from
the first sight and sound of a new acquaintance?

There is a knock at the door, and Mr. Helwyse calls out, "Hullo? Ah!
the cold water, emblem of truth. Thank you, Hebe; and scamper away as
fast as you can, for I'm going to open the door!"

We also will retire, fastidious reader, and employ the leisure
interval in packing an imaginary carpet-bag for a short journey. Our
main business, during the next few days, is with Mr. Helwyse, and
since there will be no telling what becomes of him after that, he must
be followed up pretty closely. A few days does not seem much for the
getting a satisfactory knowledge of a man; nevertheless, an hour,
rightly used, may be ample. If he will continue his habit of thinking
aloud, will affect situations tending to bring out his leading traits
of character; if we may intrude upon him, note-book in hand, in all
his moods and crises,--with all this in addition to discretionary use
of the magic mirror,--it will be our own fault if Mr. Helwyse be not
turned inside out. Properly speaking, there is no mystery about men,
but only a great dulness and lethargy in our perceptions of them. The
secret of the universe is no more a secret than is the answer to a
school-boy's problem. A mathematician will draw you a triangle and a
circle, and show you the trigonometrical science latent therein. But a
profounder mathematician would do as much with the equation man!

While Mr. Helwyse is still lingering over his toilet, his neighbor the
fiddler, whom he had meant to ask to breakfast, comes out of his room,
violin-box in hand, walks along the passage-way, and is off down
stairs. An odd-looking figure; those stylish clothes become him as
little as they would a long-limbed, angular Egyptian statue. Fashion,
in some men, is an eccentricity, or rather a violence done to their
essential selves. A born fop would have looked as little at home in a
toga and sandals, as did this swarthy musician, doctor, priest, or
whatever he was, in his fashion-plate costume. Then why did he wear
it?

There are other things to be followed up before attending to that
question. But the man is gone, and Balder Helwyse has missed this
opportunity of making his acquaintance. Had he been an hour
earlier,--had any one of us, for that matter, ever been an hour
earlier or later,--who can tell how the destinies of the world would
be affected! Luckily for our peace of mind, the hypothesis involves an
impossibility.




IV.

A BRAHMAN.


Whoever has been in Boston remembers, or has seen, the old Beacon Hill
Bank, which stood, not on Beacon Hill, indeed, but in that part of
School Street now occupied by the City Hall. You passed down by the
dirty old church, on the northeast corner of School and Tremont
Streets, which stands trying to hide its ugly face behind a row of
columns like sooty fingers, and whose School-Street side is quite
bare, and has the distracted aspect peculiar to buildings erected on
an inclined plane;--passing this, you came in sight of the bank, a
darksome, respectable edifice of brick, two stories and a half high,
and gambrel-roofed. It stood a little back from the street, much as an
antiquated aristocrat might withdraw from the stream of modern life,
and fancy himself exclusive. The poor old bank! Its respectable brick
walls have contributed a few rubbish-heaps to the new land in the Back
Bay, perhaps; and its floors and gambrel-roof have long since vanished
up somebody's chimney; only its money--its baser part--still survives
and circulates. Aristocracy and exclusivism do not pay.

The bank, perhaps, took its title from the fact that it owed its chief
support to the Beacon Hill families,--Boston's aristocracy; and
Boston's standard names appeared upon its list of managers. If
business led you that way, you mounted the well-worn steps, and
entered the rather strict and formal door, over which clung the
weather-worn sign,--faded gold lettering upon a rusty black
background. Nothing that met your eyes looked new, although everything
was scrupulously neat. Opposite the doorway, a wooden flight of stairs
mounted to the next floor, where were the offices of some old Puritan
lawyers. Leaving the stairs on your left, you passed down a dusky
passage, and through a glass door, when behold! the banking-room, with
its four grave bald-headed clerks. But you did not come to draw or
deposit, your business was with the President. "Mr. MacGentle in?"
"That way, sir." You opened a door with "Private" painted in black
letters upon its ground-glass panel. Another bald-headed gentleman,
with a grim determination about the mouth, rose up from his table and
barred your way. This was Mr. Dyke, the breakwater against which the
waves of would-be intruders into the inner seclusion often broke
themselves in vain; and unless you had a genuine pass, your expedition
ended there.

Our pass--for we, too, are to call on Mr. MacGentle--would carry us
through solider obstructions than Mr. Dyke; it is the pass of
imagination. He does not even raise his head as we brush by him.

But, first, let us inquire who Mr. MacGentle is, besides President of
the Beacon Hill Bank. He is a man of refinement and cultivation, a
scholar and a reader, has travelled, and, it is said, could handle a
pen to better purpose than the signing bank-notes. In his earlier
years he studied law, and gained a certain degree of distinction in
the profession, although (owing, perhaps, to his having entered it
with too ideal and high-strung views as to its nature and scope) he
never met with what is vulgarly called success. Fortunately for the
ideal barrister, an ample private estate made him independent of
professional earnings. Later in life, he trod the confines of
politics, still, however, enveloping himself in that theoretical,
unpractical atmosphere which was his most marked, and, to some people,
least comprehensible characteristic. A certain mild halo of
statesmanship ever after invested him; not that he had at any time
actually borne a share in the government of the nation, but it was
understood that he might have done so, had he so chosen, or had his
political principles been tough and elastic enough to endure the wear
and strain of action. As it was, some of the most renowned men in the
Senate were known to have been his intimates at college, and he still
met and conversed with them on terms of equality.

Between law, literature, and statesmanship, in all of which pursuits
he had acquired respect and goodwill, without actually accomplishing
anything, Mr. MacGentle fell, no one knew exactly how, into the
presidential chair of the Beacon Hill Bank. As soon as he was there,
everybody saw that there he belonged. His social position, his
culture, his honorable, albeit intangible record, suited the old bank
well. He had an air of subdued wisdom, and people were fond of
appealing to his judgment and asking his advice,--- perhaps because he
never seemed to expect them to follow it when given (as, indeed, they
never did). The Board of Directors looked up to him, deferred to
him,--nay, believed him to be as necessary to the bank's existence as
the entire aggregate of its supporters; but neither the Board nor the
President himself ever dreamed of adopting Mr. MacGentle's financial
theories in the conduct of the banking business.

Let no one hastily infer that the accomplished gentleman of whom we
speak was in any sense a sham. No one could be more true to himself
and his professions. But--if we may hazard a conjecture--he never
breathed the air that other men breathe; another sun than ours shone
for him; the world that met his senses was not our world. His life,
in short, was not human life, yet so closely like it that the two
might be said to correspond, as a face to its reflection in the
mirror; actual contact being in both cases impossible. No doubt the
world and he knew of the barrier between them, though neither said so.
The former, with its usual happy temperament, was little affected by
the separation, smiled good-naturedly upon the latter, and never
troubled itself about the difficulties in the way of shaking hands.
But Mr. MacGentle, being only a single man, perhaps felt lonely and
sad. Either he was a ghost, or the world was. In youth, he may have
believed himself to be the only real flesh and blood; but in later
years, the terrible weight of the world's majority forced him to the
opposite conclusion. And here, at last, he and the world were at one!

Suppose, instead of listening to a personal description of this good
old gentleman, we take a look at him with our own eyes. There is no
danger of disturbing him, no matter how busy he may be. The inner
retreat is very small, and as neat as though an old maid lived in it.
The furniture looks as good as new, but is subdued to a tone of sober
maturity, and chimes in so well with the general effect that one
scarcely notices it. The polished table is mounted in dark morocco;
behind the horsehair-covered arm-chair is a gray marble mantel-piece,
overshadowing an open grate with polished bars and fire-utensils in
the English style. During the winter months a lump of cannel-coal is
always burning there; but the flame, even on the coldest days, is too
much on its good behavior to give out very decided heat. Over the
mantel-piece hangs a crayon copy of Correggio's Reading Magdalen,--the
only touch of sentiment in the whole room, and that, perhaps,
accidental.

The concrete nature of the President's surroundings is at first
perplexing, in view of our theory about his character. But it is
evident that the world could never provide him with furniture
corresponding to the texture of his mind; and hence he would
instinctively lay hold of that which was most commonplace and
non-committal. If he could realize nothing outside himself, he might
at least remove whatever would distract him from inward contemplation.
There is, however, one article in this little room which we must not
omit to notice. It is a looking-glass; and it hangs, of all places in
the world, right over Mr. MacGentle's standing-desk, in the embrasure
of the window. As often as he looks up he beholds the reflection of
his cultured and sad-lined physiognomy, with a glimpse of dusky wall
beyond. Is he a vain man? His worst enemy, had he one, would not call
him that. Nevertheless, Mr. MacGentle finds a pathetic comfort in this
small mirror. No one, not even he, could tell wherefore; but we fancy
it to be like that an exile feels, seeing a picture of his birthplace,
or hearing a strain of his native music. The mirror shows him
something more real, to his sense, than is anything outside of it!

Well, there stands the old gentleman, writing at this desk in the
window. All men, they say, bear more or less resemblance to some
animal; Mr. MacGentle, rather tall and slender, with his slight stoop,
and his black broadcloth frock-coat buttoned closely about his waist,
brings to mind a cultivated, grandfatherly greyhound, upon his hind
legs. He has thick white hair, with a gentle curl in it, growing all
over his finely moulded head. He is close-shaven; his mouth and nose
are formed with great delicacy; his eyes, now somewhat faded, yet show
an occasional reminiscence of youthful fire. The eyebrows are
habitually lifted,--a result, possibly, of the growing infirmity of
Mr. MacGentle's vision; but it produces an expression of
half-plaintive resignation, which is rendered pathetic by the wrinkles
across his forehead and the dejected lines about his delicate mouth.

He is dressed with faultless nicety and elegance, though in a fashion
now out of date. Perhaps, in graceful recognition of the advance of
age, he has adhered to the style in vogue when age first began to
weigh upon his shoulders. He gazes mildly out from the embrasure of
an upright collar and tall stock; below spreads a wide expanse of
spotless shirt-front. His trousers are always gray, except in the heat
of summer, when they become snowy white. They are uniformly too long;
yet he never dispenses with his straps, nor with the gaiters that
crown his gentlemanly shoes.

Although not a stimulating companion, one loves to be where Amos
MacGentle is; to watch his quiet movements, and listen to his
meditative talk. What he says generally bears the stamp of thought and
intellectual capacity, and at first strikes the listener as rare good
sense; yet, if reconsidered afterwards, or applied to the practical
tests of life, his wisdom is apt to fall mysteriously short. Is Mr.
MacGentle aware of this curious fact? There sometimes is a sadly
humorous curving of the lips and glimmering in the eyes after he has
uttered something especially profound, which almost warrants the
suspicion. The lack of accord between the old gentleman and the world
has become to him, at last, a dreary sort of jest.

But we might go on forever touching the elusive chords of Mr.
MacGentle's being; one cannot help loving him, or, if he be not real
enough to love, bestowing upon him such affection as is inspired by
some gentle symphony. Unfortunately, he figures but little in the
coming pages, and in no active part; such, indeed, were unsuited to
him. But it is pleasant to pass through his retired little office on
our way to scenes less peaceful and subdued; and we would gladly look
forward to seeing him once more, when the heat of the day is over and
the sun has gone down.




V.

A NEW MAN WITH AN OLD FACE.


About an hour before noon on this same twenty-seventh of May, Mr. Dyke
heard a voice in the outer room. He had held his position in the house
as confidential clerk for nearly or quite twenty-five years, was
blessed with a good memory, and was fond of saying that he never
forgot a face or a voice. So, as this voice from the outer room
reached his ears, he turned one eye up towards the door and muttered,
"Heard that before, somewhere!"

The ground-glass panel darkened, and the door was thrown wide open.
Upon the threshold stood a young man about six feet in height, of
figure rather graceful and harmonious than massive. A black velveteen
jacket fitted closely to his shape; he had on a Tyrolese hat; his
boots, of thin, pliant leather, reached above the knee. He carried a
stout cane, with a handle of chamois-horn; to a couple of straps,
crossing each shoulder, were attached a travelling-scrip and a
telescope-case.

But neither his attire nor the unusual size and dark brilliancy of
his eyes was so noticeable as his hair and beard, which outgrew the
bounds of common experience. Beards, to be sure, were far more rare
twenty years ago than they have since become. The hair was yellow,
with the true hyacinthine curl pervading it. Rejoicing in luxuriant
might, it clothed and reclothed the head, and, descending lower,
tumbled itself in bold masses on the young man's shoulders. As for the
beard, it was well in keeping. Of a purer yellow than the hair, it
twisted down in crisp, vigorous waves below the point marked by
mankind's third shirt-stud. It was full half as broad as it was long,
and lay to the right and left from the centre-line of the face. The
owner of this oriflamme looked like a young Scandinavian god.

There seems to be a deeper significance in hair than meets the eye.
Sons of Esau, whose beards grow high up on their cheek-bones, who are
hairy down to their ankles, and to the second joints of their fingers,
are generally men of a kindly and charitable nature, strong in what we
call the human element. One remembers their stout hand-grip; they look
frankly in one's face, and the heart is apt to go out to them more
spontaneously than to the smooth-faced Jacobs. Such a man was Samson,
whose hair was his strength,--the strength of inborn truth and
goodness, whereby he was enabled to smite the lying Philistines. And
although they once, by their sophistries, managed to get the better
of him for a while, they forgot that good inborn is too vigorous a
matter for any mere razor finally to subdue. See, again, what a great
beard Saint Paul had, and what an outspoken, vigorous heart! Was it
from freak that Greeks and Easterns reverenced beards as symbols of
manhood, dignity, and wisdom? or that Christian Fathers thundered
against the barber, as a violator of divine law? No one, surely, could
accuse that handy, oily, easy little personage of evil intent; but he
symbolized the subtile principle which pares away the natural virtue
of man, and substitutes an artificial polish, which is hypocrisy. It
is to be observed, however, that hair can be representative of natural
evil as well as of good. A tangle-headed bush-ranger does not win our
sympathies. A Mussulman keeps his beard religiously clean.

Meanwhile the yellow-haired Scandinavian, whom we have already laid
under the imputation of being a dandy, stood on the threshold of Mr.
Dyke's office, and that gentleman confronted him with a singularly
inquisitive stare. The visitor's face was a striking one, but can be
described, for the present, only in general terms. He might not be
called handsome; yet a very handsome man would be apt to appear
insignificant beside him. His features showed strength, and were at
the same time cleanly and finely cut. There was freedom in the arch
of his eyebrows, and plenty of eye-room beneath them.

He took off his hat to Mr. Dyke, and smiled at him with artless
superiority, insomuch that the elderly clerk's sixty years were
disconcerted, and the Cerberus seemed to dwindle into the bumpkin!
This young fellow, a good deal less than half Mr. Dyke's age, was yet
a far older man of the world than he. Not that his appearance
suggested the kind of maturity which results from abnormal or
distorted development,--on the contrary, he was thoroughly genial and
healthful. But that power and assurance of eye and lip, generally
bought only at the price of many years' buffetings, given and taken,
were here married to the first flush and vigor of young manhood.

"My name is Helwyse; I have come from Europe to see Mr. Amos
MacGentle," said the visitor, courteously.

"Helwyse!--Hel--" repeated Mr. Dyke, having seemingly quite forgotten
himself. His customary manner to strangers implied that he knew,
better than they did, who they were and what they wanted; and that
what he knew was not much to their credit. But he could only open his
mouth and stare at this Helwyse.

"Mr. MacGentle is an old friend; run in and tell him I'm here, and you
will see." The young man put his hand kindly on the elderly clerk's
shoulder, much as though the latter were a gaping school-boy, and
directed him gently towards the inner door.

Mr. Dyke regained his voice by an effort, though still lacking
complete self-command. "I beg your pardon, Mr. Helwyse, sir,--of
course, of course,--it didn't seem possible,--so long, you know,--but
I remembered the voice and the face and the name,--I never
forget,--but, by George, sir, can you really be--?"

"I see you have a good memory; you are Dyke, aren't you?" And Mr.
Helwyse threw back his head and laughed, perhaps at the clerk's
bewildered face. At all events, the latter laughed, too, and they both
shook hands very heartily.

"Beg pardon again, Mr. Helwyse, I'll speak to the President," said Mr.
Dyke, and stepped into the sanctuary of sanctuaries.

Mr. MacGentle was taking a nap. He was seventy years old, and could
drop asleep easily. When he slept, however lightly and briefly, he was
pretty sure to dream; and if awakened suddenly, his dream would often
prolong itself, and mingle with passing events, which would themselves
put on the semblance of unreality. On the present occasion the sound
of Helwyse's voice had probably crept through the door, and insinuated
itself into his dreaming brain.

Mr. Dyke was too much excited to remark the President's condition. He
put his mouth close to the old gentleman's ear, and said, in an
emphatic and penetrating undertone,--

"Here's your old friend Helwyse, who died in Europe two years ago,
come back again, _younger than ever!_"

If the confidential clerk expected his superior to echo his own
bewilderment, he was disappointed. Mr. MacGentle unclosed his eyes,
looked up, and answered rather pettishly,--

"What nonsense are you talking about his dying in Europe, Mr. Dyke? He
hasn't been in Europe for six years. I was expecting him. Let him come
in at once."

But he was already there; and Mr. Dyke slipped out again with
consternation written upon his features. Mr. MacGentle found himself
with his thin old hand in the young man's warm grasp.

"Helwyse, how do you do?--how do you do? Ah! you look as well as ever.
I was just thinking about you. Sit down,--sit down!"

The old President's voice had a strain of melancholy in it, partly the
result of chronic asthma, and partly, no doubt, of a melancholic
temperament. This strain, being constant, sometimes had a curiously
incongruous effect as contrasted with the subject or circumstances in
hand. Whether hailing the dawn of the millennium; holding playful
converse with a child, making a speech before the Board,--under
whatever rhetorical conditions, Mr. MacGentle's intonation was always
pitched in the same murmurous and somewhat plaintive key. Moreover, a
corresponding immobility of facial expression had grown upon him; so
that altogether, though he was the most sympathetic and sensitive of
men, a superficial observer might take him to be lacking in the common
feelings and impulses of humanity.

Perhaps the incongruity alluded to had not altogether escaped his own
notice, and since discord of any kind pained him, he had mended the
matter--as best he could--by surrendering himself entirely to his
mournful voice; allowing it to master his gestures, choice of
language, almost his thoughts. The result was a colorlessness of
manner which did great injustice to the gentle and delicate soul
behind.

This conjecture might explain why Mr. MacGentle, instead of falling
upon his friend's neck and shedding tears of welcome there, only
uttered a few commonplace sentences, and then drooped back into his
chair. But it throws no light upon his remark that he had been
expecting the arrival of a friend who, it would appear, had been dead
two years. Helwyse himself may have been puzzled by this; or, being a
quick-witted young man, he may have divined its explanation. He looked
at his entertainer with critical sympathy not untinged with humor.

"I hope you are as well as I am," said he.

"A little tired this morning, I believe; I never was so strong a man
as you, Helwyse. I think I must have passed a bad night. I remember
dreaming I was an old man,--an old man with white hair, Helwyse."

"Were you glad to wake up again?" asked the young man, meeting the
elder's faded eyes.

"I hardly know whether I'm quite awake yet. And, after all, Thor, I'm
not sure that I don't wish the dream might have been true. If I were
really an old man, what a long, lonely future I should escape! but as
it is--as it is--"

He relapsed into reverie. Ah! Mr. MacGentle, are you again the tall
and graceful youth, full of romance and fire, who roamed abroad in
quest of adventures with your trusty friend Thor Helwyse, the
yellow-bearded Scandinavian? Do you fancy this fresh, unwrinkled face
a mate to your own? and is it but the vision of a restless
night,--this long-drawn life of dull routine and gradual
disappointment and decay? Open those dim eyes of yours, good sir! stir
those thin old legs! inflate that sunken chest!--Ha! is that cough
imaginary? those trembling muscles,--are they a delusion is that misty
glance only a momentary weakness There is no youth left in you, Mr.
MacGentle; not so much as would keep a rose in bloom for an hour.

"Have you seen Doctor Glyphic lately?" inquired Helwyse, after a
pause.

"Glyphic?--do you know, I was thinking of him just now,--of our first
meeting with him in the African desert. You remember!--a couple of
Bedouins were carrying him off,--they had captured him on his way to
some apocryphal ruin among the sand-heaps. What a grand moment was
that when you caught the Sheik round the throat with your
umbrella-handle, and pulled him off his horse! and then we mounted
poor Glyphic upon it,--mummied cat and all,--and away over the hot
sand! What a day was that! what a day was that!"

The speaker's eyes had kindled; for a moment one saw the far flat
desert, the struggling knot of men and horses, the stampede of the
three across the plain, and the high sun flaming inextinguishable
laughter-over all!--and it had happened nigh forty years ago.

"He never forgot that service," resumed Mr. MacGentle, his customary
plaintive manner returning. "To that, and to your saving the Egyptian
lad,--. Manetho,--you owe your wife Helen: ah! forgive me,--I had
forgotten; she is dead,--she is dead."

"I never could understand," remarked Helwyse, aiming to lead the
conversation away from gloomy topics, "why the Doctor made so much of
Manetho." "That was only a part of the Egyptian mania that possessed
him, and began, you know, with his changing his name from Henry to
Hiero; and has gone on, until now, I suppose, he actually believes
himself to be some old inscription, containing precious secrets, not
to be found elsewhere. Before the adventure with the boy, I remember,
he had formed the idea of building a miniature Egypt in New Jersey;
and Manetho served well as the living human element in it. 'Though I
take him to America,' you know he said, 'he shall live in Egypt still.
He shall have a temple, and an altar, and Isis and Osiris, and papyri
and palm-trees and a crocodile; and when he dies I will embalm him
like a Pharaoh.' 'But suppose you die first?' said one of us. 'Then he
shall embalm me!' cried Hiero, and I will be the first American
mummy.'"

Mr. MacGentle seemed to find a dreamy enjoyment in working this vein
of reminiscence. He sat back in his low arm-chair, his unsubstantial
face turned meditatively towards the Magdalen, his hands brought
together to support his delicate chin. Helwyse, apprehending that the
vein might at last bring the dreamer down to the present day,
encouraged him to follow it.

"It must have been a disappointment to the Doctor that his protégé
took up the Christian religion, instead of following the faith and
observances of his Egyptian ancestors, for the last five thousand
years!"

"Why, perhaps it was, Thor, perhaps it was," murmured Mr. MacGentle.
"But Manetho never entered the pulpit, you know; it would not have
been to his interest to do so; besides that, I believe he is really
devoted to Glyphic, believing that it was he who saved him from the
crocodile. People are all the time making such absurd mistakes.
Manetho is a man who would be unalterable either in gratitude or
enmity, although his external manner is so mild. And as to his taking
orders, why, as long as he wore an Egyptian robe, and said his prayers
in an Egyptian temple, it would be all the same to Glyphic what
religion the man professed!"

"Doctor Glyphic is still alive, then?"

The old man looked at the young one with an air half apprehensive,
half perplexed, as if scenting the far approach of some undefined
difficulty. He passed his white hand over his forehead. "Everything
seems out of joint-to-day, Helwyse. Nothing looks or seems natural,
except you! What is the matter with me?--what is the matter with me?"

Helwyse sat with both hands twisted in his mighty beard, and one
booted leg thrown over the other. He was full of sympathy at the
spectacle of poor Amos MacGentle, blindly groping after the phantom of
a flower whose bloom and fragrance had vanished so terribly long ago;
and yet, for some reason or other he could hardly forbear a smile.
When anything is utterly out of place, it is no more pathetic than
absurd; moreover, young men are always secretly inclined to laugh at
old ones!

"Why should not Glyphic be alive?" resumed Mr. MacGentle. "Why not he,
as well as you or I? Aren't we all about of an age?"

Helwyse drew his chair close to his companion's, and took his hand, as
if it had been a young girl's. "My dear friend," said he, "you said
you felt tired this morning, but you forget how far you've travelled
since we last met. Doctor Glyphic, if he be living now, must be more
than sixty years old. Your dream of old age was such as many have
dreamed before, and not awakened from in this world!"

"Let me think!--let me think!" said the old man; and, Helwyse drawing
back, there ensued a silence, varied only by a long and tremulous sigh
from his companion; whether of relief or dejection, the visitor could
not decide. But when Mr. MacGentle spoke, it was with more assurance.
Either from mortification at his illusion, or more probably from
imperfect perception of it, he made no reference to what had passed.
Old age possesses a kind of composure, arising from dulled
sensibilities, which the most self-possessed youth can never rival.

"We heard, through the London branch of our house, that Thor Helwyse
died some two years ago."

"He was drowned in the Baltic Sea. I am his son Balder."

"He was my friend," observed the old man, simply; but the tone he used
was a magnet to attract the son's heart. "You look very much like him,
only his eyes were blue, and yours, as I now see, are dark; but you
might be mistaken for him."

"I sometimes have been," rejoined Balder, with a half-smile.

"And you are his son! You are most welcome!" said Mr. MacGentle, with
old-fashioned courtesy.

"Forgive me if I have--if anything has occurred to annoy you. I am a
very old man, Mr. Balder; so old that sometimes I believe I forget how
old I am! And Thor is dead,--drowned,--you say?"

"The Baltic, you know, has been the grave of many of our forefathers;
I think my father was glad to follow them. I never saw him in better
spirits than during that gale. We were bound to England from Denmark."

"Helen's death saddened him,--I know,--I know; he was never gay after
that. But how--how did--?"

"He would keep the deck, though the helmsman had to be lashed to the
wheel. I think he never cared to see land again, but he was full of
spirits and life. He said this was weather fit for a Viking.

"We were standing by the foremast, holding on by a belaying-pin. The
sea came over the side, and struck him overboard. I went after him.
Another wave brought me back; but not my father! I was knocked
senseless, and when I came to, it was too late."

Helwyse's voice, towards the end of this story, became husky, and Mr.
MacGentle's eyes, as he listened, grew dimmer than ever.

"Ah!" said he, "I shall not die so. I shall die away gradually, like a
breeze that has been blowing this way and that all day, and falls at
sunset, no one knows how. Thor died as became him; and I shall die as
becomes me,--as becomes me!" And so, indeed, he did, a few years
later; but not unknown nor uncared for.

Balder Helwyse was a philosopher, no doubt; but it was no part of his
wisdom to be indifferent to unstrained sympathy. He went on to speak
further of his own concerns,--a thing he was little used to do.

It appeared that, from the time he first crossed the Atlantic, being
then about four years old, up to the time he had recrossed it, a few
weeks ago, he had been journeying to and fro over the Eastern
Hemisphere. His father, who, as well as himself, was American by
birth, was the descendant of a Danish family of high station and
antiquity, and inherited the restless spirit of his ancestors. In the
course of his early wanderings he had fallen in with MacGentle, who,
though somewhat older than Helwyse, was still a young man; and later
these two had encountered Hiero Glyphic. About fifteen years after
this it was that Thor appeared at Glyphic's house in New Jersey, and
was welcomed by that singular man as a brother; and here he fell in
love with Glyphic's sister Helen, and married her. With her he
received a large fortune, which the addition of his own made great;
and at Glyphic's death Thor or his heirs would inherit the bulk of the
estate left by him.

So Thor, being then in the first prime of life, was prepared to settle
down and become domestic. But the sudden death of his wife, and the
subsequent loss of one of the children she had borne him, drove him
once more abroad, with his baby son, never again to take root, or to
return. And here Balder's story, as told by him, began. He seemed to
have matured very early, and to have taken hold of knowledge in all
its branches like a Titan. The precise age at which he had learned all
that European schools could teach him, it is not necessary to specify;
since it is rather with the nature of his mind than with the list of
his accomplishments that we shall have to do. It might be possible, by
tracing his-connection with French, or German, or English
philosophers, to make shrewd guesses at the qualities of his own!
creed; but these will perhaps reveal themselves less diffidently under
other tests.

The last four or five years of his life Balder had spent in acquiring
such culture as schools could not give him. Where he went, what he did
and saw, we shall not exercise our power categorically to reveal;
remarking only that his means and his social rank left him free to go
as high as well as low as he pleased,--to dine with English dukes or
with Russian serfs. But a fine chastity inherent in his Northern blood
had, whatever were his moral convictions, kept him from the mire; and
the sudden death of his father had given him a graver turn than was
normal to his years. Meanwhile, the financial crash, which at this
time so largely affected Europe, swallowed up the greater part of
Balder's fortune; and with the remnant (about a thousand pounds
sterling), and a potential independence (in the shape of a learned
profession) in his head, he sailed for Boston.

"I knew you were my uncle Hiero's bankers," he added, "and I supposed
you would be able to tell me about him. He is my only living
relative."

"Why, as to that, I believe it is a long time since the house has had
anything to do with his concerns," returned the venerable President,
abstractedly gazing at Balder's high boots; "but I'll ask Mr. Dyke. He
remembers everything."

That gentleman (who had not passed an easy moment since Mr. Helwyse's
arrival) was now called in, and his suspense regarding the mysterious
visitor soon relieved. In respect to Doctor Glyphic's affair he was
ready and explicit.

"No dollar of his money has been through our hands since winter of
Eighteen thirty-five--six, Mr. Helwyse, sir,--winter following your
and your respected father's departure for foreign parts," stated Mr.
Dyke, straightening his mouth, and planting his fist on his hip.

"Hm--hm!" murmured the President, standing thin and bent before the
empty fireplace, a coat-tail over each arm.

"You have heard nothing of him since then?"

"Nothing, Mr. Helwyse, sir! Reverend Manetho Glyphic--understood to be
the Doctor's adopted son--came here and effected the transfer, under
authority, of course, of his foster-father's signature. Where the
property is at this moment, how invested with what returns, neither
the President nor I can inform you, sir."

"Hm--hm!" remarked Mr. MacGentle again. It was a favorite comment of
his upon business topics.

"It is possible I may be a very wealthy man," said Balder, when Mr.
Dyke had made his resolute bow and withdrawn. "But I hope my uncle is
alive. It would be a loss not to have known so eccentric a man. I have
a miniature of him which I have often studied, so that I shall know
him when we meet. Can he be married, do you think?"

"Why no, Balder; no, I should hardly think so," answered Mr.
MacGentle, who, at the departure of his confidential clerk, had
relapsed into his unofficial position and manner. "By the way, do
_you_ contemplate that step?"

"It is said to be an impediment to great enterprises. I could learn
little by domestic life that I could not learn better otherwise."

"Hm,--we could not do without woman, you know."

"If I could marry Woman, I would do it," said the young man,
unblushingly. "But a single crumb from that great loaf would be of no
use to me."

"Ah, you haven't learned to appreciate women! You never knew your
mother, Balder; and your sister was lost before she was old enough to
be anything to you. By the way, I have always cherished a hope that
she might yet be found. Perhaps she may,--perhaps she may."

Balder looked perplexed, till, thinking the old gentleman might be
referring to a reunion in a future state, he said,--

"You believe that people recognize one another in the next world, Mr.
MacGentle?"

"Perhaps,--perhaps; but why not here as well?" murmured the other, in
reply; and Balder, suspecting a return of absent-mindedness, yielded
the point. He had grown up in the belief that his twin-sister had died
in her infancy; but his venerable friend appeared to be under a
different impression.

"I shall go to New York, and try to find my uncle, or some trace of
him," said he. "If I'm unsuccessful, I mean to come back here, and
settle as a physician."

"What is your specialty?"

"I'm an eye-doctor. The Boston people are not all clear-eyed, I hope."

"Not all,--I should say not all; perhaps you may be able to help me,
to begin with," said Mr. MacGentle, with a gleam of melancholy humor.
"I will ask Mr. Dyke about the chances for a practice he knows
everything. And, Balder," he added, when the young man rose to go,
"let me hear from you, and see you again sometimes, whatever may
happen to you in the way of fortune. I'm rather a lonely old man,--a
lonely old man, Balder."

"I'll be here again very soon, unless I get married, or commit a
murder or some such enormity," rejoined Helwyse, his long mustache
curling to, his smile. They shook hands,--the vigorous young god of
the sun and the faded old wraith of Brahmanism,--with a friendly look
into each other's eyes.




VI.

THE VAGARIES OF HELWYSE.


Balder Helwyse was a man full of natural and healthy instincts: he was
not afraid to laugh uproariously when so inclined; nor apt to
counterfeit so much as a smile, only because a smile would look well.
What showed a rarer audacity,--he had more than once dared to weep! To
crush down real emotions formed, in short, no part of his ideal of a
man. Not belonging to the Little-pot-soon-hot family, he had, perhaps,
never found occasion to go beyond the control of his temper, and blind
rage he would in no wise allow himself; but he delighted in
antagonisms, and though it came not within his rules to hate any man,
he was inclined to cultivate an enemy, as more likely to be
instructive than some friends. His love of actual battle was intense:
he had punched heads with many a hard-fisted school-boy in England; he
bore the scar of a German _schläger_ high up on his forehead; and
later, in Paris, he had deliberately invaded the susceptibilities of a
French journalist, had followed him to the field of honor, and been
there run through the body with a small-sword, to the satisfaction of
both parties. He was confined to his bed for a while; but his
overflowing spirits healed the wound to the admiration of his doctors.

These examples of self-indulgence have been touched upon only by way
of preparing the gentle reader for a shock yet more serious. Helwyse
was a disciple of Brillat-Savarin,--in one word, a gourmand! His
appetite never failed him, and, he knew how wisely to direct it. He
never ate a careless or thoughtless meal, be its elements simple as
they might. He knew and was loved by the foremost cooks all over
Europe. Never did he allow coarseness or intemperance to mar the
refinement of his palate.

"Man," he was accustomed to say, "is but a stomach, and the cook is
the pope of stomachs, in whose church are no respectable heretics. Our
happiness lies in his saucepan,--at the mercy of his spit. Eating is
the appropriation to our needs of the good and truth of life, as
existing in material manifestation: the cook is the high-priest of
that symbolic ceremony! I, and kings with me, bow before him! But his
is a responsibility beneath which Atlas might stagger; he, of all men,
must be honest, warm-hearted, quick of sympathy, full of compassion
towards his race. Let him rejoice, for the world extols him for its
well-being;--yet tremble! lest upon his head fall the curse of its
misery!"

This speech was always received with applause; the peroration being
delivered with a vast controlled emphasis of eye and voice; and it was
followed by the drinking of the cook's health. "The generous virtues,"
Mr. Helwyse would then go on to say, "arise from the cultivation of
the stomach. From man's very earthliness springs the flower of his
spiritual virtue. We affect to despise the flesh, as vile and
unworthy. What, then, is flesh made of? of nothing?--let who can,
prove that! No, it is made of spirit,--of the divine, everlasting
substance; it is the wall which holds Heaven in place! If there be
anything vile in it, it is of the Devil's infusion, and enters not
into the argument."

A man who had expressed such views as these at the most renowned
tables of France and England was not likely to forget his principles
in the United States. Accordingly, he arose early, as we have seen, on
the morning after his arrival, and forced an astonished waiter to
marshal him to the kitchen, and introduce him to the cook. The cook of
the Granite Hotel at that time was a round, red-lipped Italian, an
artist and enthusiast, but whose temper had been much tried by lack of
appreciation; and, although his salary was good, he contemplated
throwing it over, abandoning the Yankee nation to its fate, and
seeking some more congenial field. Balder, who, when the mood was on
him, could wield a tongue persuasive as Richard the Third's, talked
to this man, and in seven minutes had won his whole heart. The
immediate result was a delectable breakfast, but the sequel was a
triumph indeed. It seems that the æsthetic Italian had for several
days been watching over a brace of plump, truffled partridges. This
day they had reached perfection, and were to have been eaten by no
less a person than the cook himself. These cherished birds did he now
actually offer to make over to his eloquent and sympathetic
acquaintance. Balder was deeply moved, and accepted the gift on one
condition,--that the donor should share the feast! "When a man serves
me up his own heart,--truffled, too,--he must help me eat it," he
said, with emotion. The condition imposed was, after faint resistance,
agreed to; the other episodes of the bill of fare were decided upon,
and the Italian and the Scandinavian were to dine together that
afternoon.

It still lacked something of the dinner-hour when Mr. Helwyse came out
through the dark passage-way of the Beacon Hill Bank, and paused for a
few moments on the threshold, looking up and down the street. Against
the dark background he made a handsome picture,--tall, gallant,
unique. The May sunshine, falling, athwart the face of the gloomy old
building, was glad to light up the waves of his beard and hair, and
to cast the shadow of his hat-brim over his forehead and eyes. The
picture stays just long enough to fix itself in the memory, and then
the young man goes lightly down the worn steps, and is lost along the
crowded street. Such as he is now, we shall not see him standing in
that dark frame again!

Wherever he went, Balder Helwyse was sure to be stared at; but to this
he was admirably indifferent. He never thought of speculating about
what people thought of Mr. Helwyse; but to his own approval--something
not lightly to be had--he was by no means indifferent. Towards mankind
at large he showed a kindly but irreverent charity, which excused
imperfection, not so much from a divine principle of love as from
scepticism as to man's sufficient motive and faculty to do well. Of
himself he was a blunt and sarcastic critic, perhaps because he
expected more of himself than of the rest of the world, and fancied
that that person only had the ability to be his censor!

If the Christian reader regards this mental attitude as unsound, far
be it from us to defend it! It must, nevertheless, be admitted that
whoever feels the strong stirring of power in his head and hands will
learn its limits from no purely subjective source. The lesson must
begin from without, and the only argument will be a deadly struggle.
Until then, self-esteem, however veiled beneath self-criticism, cannot
but increase. And if the man has had wisdom and strength to abstain
from vulgar self-pollution, Satan must intrust his spear to no
half-fledged devil, but grasp it in his own hand, and join battle in
his own person.

Undismayed by this fact, Helwyse reached Washington Street, and
followed its westerly meanderings, meaning to spend part of the
interval before dinner in exploring Boston. He walked with an easy
sideways-swaying of the shoulders, whisking his cane, and smiling to
himself as he recalled the points of his interview with the President.

"Just the thing, to make MacGentle tutelary divinity of so elusive a
matter as money! Wonder whether the Directors ever thought of that?
For all his unreality, though, he has something more real in him than
the heaviest Director on the Board!

"How composedly he took me for my father! and when he discovered his
mistake, how composedly he welcomed me in my own person! Was that the
extreme of senility? or was it a subtile assertion of the fact, that
he who keeps in the vanguard of the age in a certain sense contains
his father--the past--within himself, and is a distinct person chiefly
by virtue of that containing power?

"Why didn't I ask him more about my foster-cousin Manetho? Egyptians
are more astute than affectionate. Would he cleave to my poor uncle
for these last eighteen years merely for love? Why did he transfer
that money so soon after we sailed? Ten to one, he has in his own
hands the future as well as the present disposal of Doctor Hiero
Glyphic's fortune! The old gentleman has had time to make a hundred
wills since the one he showed my father, twenty years ago!

"Well, and what is that to you? Ah, Balder Helwyse, you lazy impostor,
you are pining for Egyptian flesh-pots! Don't tell me about civility
to relatives, and the study of human nature! You are as bad as you
accuse your poor cousin of being,--who may be dead, or pastor of a
small parish, for all you know. And yet every school-girl can prattle
of the educational uses of poverty, and of having to make one's own
living! I have a good mind to take your thousand pounds sterling out
of your pocket and throw them into Charles River,--and then begin at
the beginning! By the time I'd learnt what poverty can teach, it would
be over,--or I am no true man! Only they who are ashamed of
themselves, or afraid of other people, need to start rich."

Nevertheless, he could not do otherwise than hunt up the only relative
he had in America. Subsequent events did not convict him of being a
mere egotist, swayed only by the current of base success. He did not
despise prosperity, but he cared yet more to find out truths about
things and men. This is not the story of a fortune-hunter; not, at all
events, of a hunter of such fortunes as are made and lost nowadays.
But, when one half of a man detects unworthy motives in the other
half, it is embarrassing. He acts most wisely, perhaps, who drops
discussion, and lets the balance of good and bad, at the given moment,
decide. Our compound life makes many compromises, whereby our
progress, whether heavenward or hellward, is made slow--and sure!

Here, or hereabouts, Balder lost his way. When thinking hard, he was
beside himself; he strode, and tossed his beard, and shouldered
inoffensive people aside, and drew his eyebrows together, or smiled.
Then, by and by, he would awake to realities, and find himself he knew
not where.

This time, it was in an unsavory back-street; some dirty children were
playing in the gutters, and a tall, rather flashily dressed man was
walking along some distance ahead, carrying something in one hand.
Helwyse at first mended his pace to overtake the fellow, and ask the
way to the hotel. But he presently changed his purpose, his attention
being drawn to the oddity of the other's behavior.

The man was evidently one of those who live much alone, and so
contract unconscious habits, against which society offers the only
safeguard. He was absorbed in some imaginary dialogue; and so
imperfectly could his fleshly veil conceal his mental processes, that
he gesticulated everything that passed through his mind. These
gestures, though perfectly apparent to a steady observer, were so far
kept within bounds as not to get more than momentary notice from the
passers-by, who, indeed, found metal more attractive to their gaze in
Helwyse.

Now did the man draw his head back and spread out his arms, as in
surprise and repudiation; now his shoulders rose high, in deprecation
or disclaimer. Now his forefinger cunningly sought the side of his
nose; now his fist shook in an imaginary face. At times he would
stretch out a pleading arm and neck; the next moment he was an
inflexible tyrant, spurning a suppliant. Again he would break into a
soundless chuckle; then, raising his hand to his forehead, seem
overwhelmed with despair and anguish. Occasionally he would walk some
distance quite passively, only glancing furtively about him; but
erelong he would forget himself again, and the dialogue would begin
anew.

Balder watched the man curiously, but without seeming to perceive the
rather grisly similitude between the latter's vagaries and his own.

"What an ugly thing the inside of this person seems to be!" he said.
"But then, whose thoughts and emotions would not render him a
laughing-stock if they could be seen? If everybody looked, to his
fellow, as he really is, or even as he looks to himself, mankind would
fly asunder, and think the stars hiding-places not remote enough! How
many men in the world could walk from one end of the street they live
in to the other, talking and acting their inmost thoughts all the way,
and retain a bit of anybody's respect or love afterwards? No wonder
Heaven is pure, if, our spiritual bodies are only thoughts and
feelings! and a Hell where every devil saw his fellow's deformity
outwardly manifested would be Hell indeed!

"But that can't be. Angels behold their own loveliness, because doing
so makes them lovelier; but no devil could know his own vileness and
live. They think their hideousness charming, and, when the darkness is
thickest about them, most firmly believe themselves in Heaven. But the
light of Heaven would be real darkness to them, for a ray of it would
strike them blind!"

Helwyse was too prone to moralizing. It shall not be our cue to quote
him, save when to do so may seem to serve an ulterior purpose.

"I would like to hear the story that fellow is so exercised about,"
muttered his pursuer. "How do I know it doesn't concern me? That
violin-box he carries is very much in his way; shall I offer to carry
it for him, and, in return, hear his story? If the music soothes his
soul as much as the box moderates his gestures--"

Here the man abruptly turned into a doorway, and was gone. On coming
up, Helwyse found that the doorway led in through a pair of green
folding-doors to some place unseen. The house had an air of villanous
respectability,--a gambling-house air, or worse. Did the musician live
there? Helwyse paused but a moment, and then walked on; and thus,
sagacious reader, the meeting was for the second time put off.

When he reached his hotel, he had only half an hour to dress for
dinner in; but he prepared himself faultlessly, chanting a sort of
hymn to Appetite the while. "Hunger," quoth he, "is mightiest of
magicians; breeds hope, energy, brains; prompts to love and
friendship. Hunger gives day and night their meaning, and makes the
pulse of time beat; creates society, industry, and rank. Hunger moves
man to join in the work of creation,--to harmonize himself with the
music of the universe,--to feel ambition, joy, and sorrow. Hunger
unites man to nature in the ever-recurring inspiration to food,
followed by the ever-alternating ecstasy of digestion. Morning tunes
his heart to joy, for the benison of breakfast awaits him. The sun
scales heaven to light him to his noonday meal. Evening wooes him
supperwards, and night brings timeless sleep, to waft him to another
dawn. Eating is earth's first law, and heaven itself could not subsist
without it!"

So Balder Helwyse and the cook feasted gloriously that afternoon, in
the back pantry, and they solemnly installed the partridges among the
constellations!




VII.

A QUARREL.


That same afternoon Mr. MacGentle put his head into the outer office
and said, "Mr. Dyke, could I speak with you a moment?"

Mr. Dyke scraped back his chair and went in, with his polished bald
head, and square face and figure,--a block of common-sense. He was
more common-sensible than usual, that afternoon, because he had so
strangely forgotten himself in the morning. Mr. MacGentle was in his
usual position for talking with his confidential clerk,--standing up
with his back to the fireplace, and his coat-tails over his arms.
Experience had taught him that this attitude was better adapted than
any other to sustain the crushing weight of Mr. Dyke's sense. To have
conversed with him in a sitting position would have been to lose
breath and vitality before the end of five minutes.

"Mr. Helwyse has thoughts of settling in Boston to practise his
profession," began the President, gently. "I told him you would be
likely to know what the chances are."

"Profession is--what?" demanded Mr. Dyke, settling his fist on his
hip.

"O--doctor--physician; eye-doctor, he said, I think."

"Eye-doctor? Well, Dr. Schlemm won't last the winter; may drop any
day. Just the thing for Mr. Helwyse,--Dr. Helwyse." And the subject,
being discussed at some length between the two gentlemen, took on a
promising aspect. His house was picked out for the new incumbent, his
earnings calculated, his success foretold. Two characters so diverse
as were the President and his clerk united, it seems, in liking the
young physician.

"Married?" asked Mr. Dyke, after a pause.

"Why, no,--no; and he doesn't seem inclined to marry. But he is quite
young; perhaps he may, later on in life, Mr. Dyke."

The elderly clerk straightened his mouth. "Matter of taste--and
policy. Gives solidity,--position;--and is an expense and a
responsibility." Mr. Dyke himself was well known to be the husband of
an idolized wife, and the father of a despotic family.

"He never had the advantage of woman's influence in his childhood, you
know. His poor mother died in giving him and his sister birth; and the
sister was lost,--stolen away, two or three years later. He does not
appreciate woman at her true value," murmured MacGentle.

"Stolen away? His sister died in infancy,--so I understood, sir,"
said the clerk, whose versions of past events were apt to differ from
the President's.

But the President--perhaps because he was conscious that his memory
regarding things of recent occurrence was treacherous--was abnormally
sensitive as to the correctness of his more distant reminiscences.

"O no, she was stolen,--stolen by her nurse, just before Thor Helwyse
went to Europe, I think," said he.

"Beg your pardon, sir," said Mr. Dyke, with an iron smile;
"died,--burnt to death in her first year,--yes, sir!"

"Mr. Dyke," rejoined MacGentle, dignifiedly, lifting his chin high
above his stock, "I have myself seen the little girl, then in her
third year, pulling her brother's hair on the nursery floor. She was
dark-eyed,--a very lovely child. As to the burning, I now recollect
that when the house in Brooklyn took fire, the child was in danger,
but was rescued by her nurse, who herself received very severe
injuries."

Mr. Dyke heaved a long, deliberate sigh, and allowed his eyes to
wander slowly round the room, before replying.

"You are not a family man, Mr. MacGentle, sir! Don't blame you, sir!
Your memory, perhaps--But no matter! The nurse who stole the child
was, I presume, the same who rescued her from the fire?"

Mr. Dyke perhaps intended to give a delicately ironical emphasis to
this question, but his irony was apt to be a rather unwieldy and
unmistakable affair. The truth was, he was a little staggered by the
President's circumstantial statement; whence his deliberation, and his
not entirely pertinent rejoinder about "a family man."

"And why not the same, sir? I ask you, why not the same?" demanded Mr.
MacGentle, with slender imperiousness.

But, by this time, Mr. Dyke had thought of a new argument.

"The little girl, I understood you to say, was dark? Since she was the
twin-sister of one of Mr. Balder Helwyse's complexion, that is odd,
Mr. MacGentle,--odd, sir." And the solid family man fixed his sharp
brown eyes full upon the unsubstantial bachelor. The latter's delicate
nostrils expanded, and a pink flush rose to his faded cheeks. He was
now as haughty and superb as a paladin.

"I will discuss business subjects with my subordinates, Mr. Dyke; not
other subjects, if you please! This dispute was not begun by me. Let
it be carried no further, sir! Twins are not necessarily, nor
invariably, of the same complexion. Let nothing more be said, Mr.
Dyke. I trust the little girl may yet be found and restored to her
family--to--to her brother! I trust she may yet be found, sir!" And he
glared at Mr. Dyke aggressively.

"I trust you may live to see it, Mr. MacGentle, sir!" said the
confidential clerk, shifting his ground in a truly masterly manner;
and before the President could recover, he had bowed and gone out. Ten
minutes afterwards MacGentle opened the door, and lo! Dyke himself on
the threshold.

"Mr. Dyke!"

"Mr. MacGentle!" in the same breath.

"I--Mr. Dyke, let me apologize for my asperity,--for my rudeness,"
says MacGentle, stepping forward and holding out his thin white hand,
his eyebrows more raised than ever, the corners of his mouth more
depressed. "I am sincerely sorry that--that--"

"O sir!" cries the square clerk, grasping the thin hand in both his
square palms; "O sir! O sir! No, no!--no, no! I was just coming to beg
you--My fault,--my fault, Mr. MacGentle, sir! No, no!"

Thus incoherently ended the quarrel between these two old friends, the
dispute being left undecided. But the important point was established
that Balder Helwyse was insured a practice in Boston, in case his
uncle Glyphic's fortune failed to enrich him.




VIII.

A COLLISION IMMINENT.


A large, handsome steamer was the "Empire State," of the line which
ran between Newport and New York. She was painted white, had
walking-beam engines, and ornamented paddle-boxes, and had been known
to run nearly twenty knots in an hour. On the evening of the
twenty-seventh of May, in the year of which we write, she left her
Newport dock as usual, with a full list of passengers. On getting out
of the harbor, she steamed into a bank of solid fog, and only got out
of it the next morning, just before passing Hellgate, at the head of
East River, New York. On the passage down Long Island Sound she met
with an accident. She ran into the schooner Resurrection, which was
lying becalmed across her course, carrying away most of the schooner's
bowsprit, but doing no serious damage. This, however, was not the
worst. On arriving in New York, it was found that one of the
passengers was missing! He had fallen overboard during the night,
possibly at the time of the collision.

Balder Halwyse was on board. After dining with the cook, and smoking
a real Havana cigar (probably the first real one that he had ever been
blessed with), he put a package of the same brand in his
travelling-bag, bade his entertainer,--who had solemnly engaged to
remain in Boston for Mr. Helwyse's sole sake,--bade his
fellow-convivialist good by, and took the train to Newport, and from
there the "Empire State" for New York.

The darkness was the most impenetrable that the young man had ever
seen; Long Island Sound was like a pocket. The passengers--those who
did not go to their state-rooms at once--sat in the cabin reading, or
dozing on the chairs and sofas. A few men stayed out on deck for an
hour or two, smoking; but at last they too went in. The darkness was
appalling. The officer on the bridge blew his steam fog-whistle every
few minutes, and kept his lanterns hung out; but they must have been
invisible at sixty yards.

Helwyse kept the deck alone. Apparently he meant to smoke his whole
bundle of cigars before turning in. He paced up and down,
Napoleon-like in his high boots, until finally he was brought to a
stand by the blind night-wall, which no man can either scale or
circumvent. Then he leaned on the railing and looked against the
darkness. Not a light to be seen in heaven or on earth! The water
below whispered and swirled past, torn to soft fragments by the
gigantic paddle-wheel. Helwyse's beard was wet and his hands sticky
with the salt mist.

Ever and anon sounded the fog-whistle, hoarsely, as though the fog had
got in its throat; and the pale glare of a lantern, fastened aloft
somewhere, lighted up the white issuing steam for a moment. There was
no wind; one was conscious of motion, but all sense of direction and
position--save to the steersman--was lost. Helwyse could see the red
end of his cigar, and very cosey and friendly it looked; but he could
see nothing else.

It is said that staid and respectable people, when thoroughly steeped
in night, will sometimes break out in wild grimaces and outlandish
gesticulations. It is certainly the time when unlawful thoughts and
words come to men most readily and naturally. Night brings forth many
things that daylight starts from. The real power of darkness lies not
in merely baffling the eyesight, but in creating the feeling of
darkness in the soul. The chains of light are broken, and we can
almost believe our internal night to be as impenetrable to God's eyes
as that external, to our own!

By and by Helwyse thought he would find some snug place and sit down.
The cabin of the "Empire State" was built on the main deck, abaft the
funnel, like a long, low house. Between the stern end of this house
and the taffrail was a small space, thickly grown with camp-stools.
Helwyse groped his way thither, got hold of a couple of the
camp-stools, and arranged himself comfortably with his back against
the cabin wall. The waves bubbled invisibly in the wake beneath. After
sitting for a while in the dense blackness, Helwyse began to feel as
though his whole physical self were shrivelled into a single atom,
careering blindly through infinite space!

After all, and really, was he anything more? If he chose to think not,
what logic could convince him of the contrary? Visible creation, as
any child could tell him, was an illusion,--was not what it seemed to
be. But this darkness was no illusion! Why, then, was it not the only
reality? and he but an atom, charged with a vital power of so-called
senses, that generally deceived him, but sometimes--as now--let him
glimpse the truth? The fancy, absurd as it was, had its attraction for
the time being. This great living, staring world of men and things is
a terrible weight to lug upon one's back. But if man be an invisible
atom, what a vast, wild, boundless freedom is his! Infinite space is
wide enough to cut any caper in, and no one the wiser.

One would like to converse with a man who had been born and had lived
in solitude and darkness. What original views he would have about
himself and life! Would he think himself an abstract intelligence,
out of space and time? What a riddle his physical sensations would be
to him! Or, suppose him to meet with another being brought up in the
same way; how they would mystify each other! Would they learn to feel
shame, love, hate? or do the passions only grow in sunshine? Would
they ever laugh? Would they hatch plots against each other, lie,
deceive? Would they have secrets from each other?

But, fancy aside, take a supposable case. Suppose two sinners of our
daylight world to meet for the first time, mutually unknown, on a
night like this. Invisible, only audible, how might they plunge
profound into most naked intimacy,--read aloud to each other the
secrets of their deepest hearts! Would the confession lighten their
souls, or make them twice as heavy as before? Then, the next morning,
they might meet and pass, unrecognizing and unrecognized. But would
the knot binding them to each other be any the less real, because
neither knew to whom he was tied? Some day, in the midst of friends,
in the brightest glare of the sunshine, the tone of a voice would
strike them pale and cold.

Somewhat after this fashion, perhaps, did Helwyse commune with
himself. He liked to follow the whim of the moment, whither it would
lead him. He was romantic; it was one of his agreeablest traits,
because spontaneous; and he indulged it the more, as being confident
that he had too much solid ballast in the hold to be in danger of
upsetting. To-night, at this point of his mental ramble, he found that
his cigar had gone out. Had he been thinking aloud? He believed not,
and yet there was no telling; he often did so, unconsciously. Were it
so, and were any one listening, that person had him decidedly at
advantage!

What put it into his head that some one might be listening? It may
have come by pure accident,--if there be such a thing. The idea
returned, stealing over his mind like a chilling breath. What if some
one had all along been close beside him, with eyes fixed upon him!
Helwyse found himself sitting perfectly still, holding his breath to
listen. There was no disguising it,--he felt uneasy. He wished his
cigar had not gone out. On second thoughts, he wished there had not
been any cigar at all, because, if any one were near, the cigar must
have pointed out the smoker's precise position. The uneasiness did not
lessen, but grew more defined.

It was like the sensation felt when pointed at by a human finger, or
stared at persistently. Was there indeed any one near? No sound or
movement gave answer, but the odd sensation continued. Helwyse fancied
he could now tell whence it came;--from the left, and not far away. He
peered earnestly thitherward, but his eyes only swallowed blackness.

Was not this carrying a whim to a foolish length? If he thought he
had a companion, why not speak, and end the doubt? But the dense
silence, darkness, uncertainty, made common-sense seem out of place.
The whole black fog, the sea, the earth itself, seemed to be pressing
down his will! The longer he delayed, the weaker he grew.

A slight shifting of his position caused him all at once to encounter
the eyes of the unseen presence with his own! The stout-nerved young
fellow was startled to the very heart. Was the unseen presence
startled also? At all events, the shock found Balder Helwyse his
tongue, seldom before tied up without his consent.

"I hope I'm not disturbing your solitude. You are not a noisy
neighbor, sir."

So flat fell the words on the blank darkness, it seemed as if there
could never be a reply. Nevertheless, a reply came.

"You must come much nearer me than you are, to disturb my solitude. It
does not consist in being without a companion."

The quality of this voice of darkness was peculiar. It sounded old,
yet of an age that had not outlived the devil of youth. Probably the
invisibility of the speaker enhanced its effect. With most of the
elements of pleasing, it was nevertheless repulsive. It was soft,
fluent, polished, but savage license was not far off, hard held by a
slender leash; an underlying suggestion of harsh discordance. The
utterance, though somewhat rapid, was carefully distinct.

Helwyse had the gift of familiarity,--of that rare kind of familiarity
which does not degenerate into contempt. But there was an incongruity
about this person, hard to assimilate. In a couple of not very
original sentences, he had wrought upon his listener an effect of
depraved intellectual power, strangely combined with artless
simplicity,--an unspeakably distasteful conjunction! Imagination,
freed from the check of the senses, easily becomes grotesque; and
Helwyse, unable to see his companion, had no difficulty in picturing
him as a grisly monster, having a satanic head set upon the ingenuous
shoulders of a child. And what was Helwyse himself? No longer, surely,
the gravely humorous moralizer? The laws of harmony forbid! He is a
monster likewise; say--since grotesqueness is in vogue--the heart of
Lucifer burning beneath the cool brain of a Grecian sage. The
symbolism is not inapt, since Helwyse, while afflicted with pride and
ambition as abstract as boundless, had, at the same time, a logical,
fearless brain, and keen delight in beauty.

"I was just thinking," remarked the latter monster, "that this was a
good place for confidential conversation."

"You believe, then, that talking relieves the mind?" rejoined the
former, softly.

"I believe a thief or a murderer would be glad of an hour--such as now
passes--to impart the story of what is dragging him to Hell. And even
the best houses are better for an airing!"

"A pregnant idea! There are certainly some topics one would like to
discuss, free from the restraint that responsibility imposes. Have you
ever reflected on the subject of omnipotence?"

Somewhat confounded at this bold question, Helwyse hesitated a moment.

"I can't see you, remember, any more than you can see me," insinuated
the voice, demurely.

"I believe I have sometimes asked myself whether it were
obtainable,--how it might best be approximated," admitted Helwyse,
cautiously; for he began to feel that even darkness might be too
transparent for the utterance of some thoughts.

"But you never got a satisfactory answer, and are not therefore
omnipotent? Well, the reason probably is, that you started wrongly.
Did it ever occur to you to try the method of sin?"

"To obtain omnipotence? No!"

"It wouldn't be right,--eh?" chuckled the voice. "But then one must
lay aside prejudice if one wants to be all-powerful! Now, sin denotes
separation; the very etymology of the word should have attracted the
attention of an ambitious man, such as you seem to be. It is a path
separate from all other paths, and therefore worth exploring."

"It leads to weakness, not to power!"

"If followed in the wrong spirit, very true. But the wise man sins and
is strong! See how frank I am!--But don't let me monopolize the
conversation."

"I should like to hear your argument, if you have one. You are a
prophet of new things."

"Sin is an old force, though it may be applied in new ways. Well, you
will admit that the true sinner is the only true reformer and
philosopher among men? No? I will explain, then. The world is full of
discordances, for which man is not to blame. His endeavor to meet and
harmonize this discordance is called sin. His indignation at disorder,
rebellion against it, attempts to right it, are crimes! That is the
vulgar argument which wise men smile at."

"I may be very dull; but I think your explanations need explaining."

"We'll take some examples. What is the liar, but one who sees the
false relations of things, and seeks to put them in the true? The
mission of the thief, again, is to equalize the notoriously unjust
distribution of wealth. A fundamental defect in the principles of
human association gave birth to the murderer; and as for the
adulterer, he is an immortal protest against the absurd laws which
interfere between the sexes. Are not these men, and others of similar
stamp, the bulwarks of true society,--our leaders towards justice and
freedom?"

Whether this were satire, madness, or earnest, Helwyse could not
determine. The night-fog had got into his brain. He made shift,
however, to say that the criminal class were not, as a mere matter of
fact, the most powerful.

"Again you misapprehend me," rejoined the voice, with perfect suavity.
"No doubt there are many weak and foolish persons who commit
crimes,--nay, I will admit that the vast majority of criminals are
weak and foolish; but that does not affect the dignity of the true
sinner,--he who sins from exalted motives. Ignorance is the only real
crime, polluting deeds that, wisely done, are sublime. Sin is
culture!"

"Were I, then, from motives of self-culture, to kill you, I should be
taking a long step towards rising in your estimation?" put in Helwyse.

"Admirable!" softly exclaimed the voice, in a tone as of an approving
pat on the back. "Certainly, I should be the last to deny it! But
would it not be more for the general good, were I, who have long been
a student of these things, to kill a seeming novice like you? It
would assure me of having had one sincere disciple."

"I wonder whether he's really mad?" mused Balder Helwyse, shuddering a
little in the dampness.

"But, badinage aside," resumed this loquacious voice, "although there
is so much talk and dispute about evil, very few people know what evil
essentially is. Now, there are some things, the mere doing of which by
the most involuntary agent would at once stamp his soul with the
conviction of ineffable sin. He would have touched the essence of
evil. And if a wise man has done that, he has had in his hand the key
to omnipotence!"

"It is easily had, then. A man need but take his Leviticus and
Deuteronomy, and run through the catalogue of crimes. He would be sure
of finding the key hidden beneath some of them."

"No; you do Moses scant justice. He--shrewd soul!--was too cunning to
fall into such an error as that. He forbade a few insignificant and
harmless acts, which every one is liable to commit. His policy was no
less simple than sagacious. By amusing mankind with such trumpery, he
lured them off the scent of true sin. Believe me, the artifice was no
idle one. Should mankind learn the secret, a generation would not pass
before the world would be turned upside down, and its present Ruler
buried in the ruins!"

At this point, surely, Helwyse got up and went to his state-room
without listening to another word?--Not so. The Lucifer in him was
getting the better of the sage. He wanted to hear all that the voice
of darkness had to say. There might be something new, something
instructive in it. He might hear a word that would unbar the door he
had striven so long to open. He aimed at knowledge and power beyond
recognized human reach. He had taken thought with himself keenly and
deeply, but was still uncertain and unsatisfied. Here opened a new
avenue, so untried as to transcend common criticism. The temptation to
omnipotence is a grand thing, and may have shaken greater men than
Helwyse; and he had trained himself to regard it--not exactly as a
temptation. As for good or bad methods,--at a certain intellectual
height such distinctions vanish. Vulgar immorality he would turn from
as from anything vulgar; but refined, philosophic immorality, as a
weapon of power,--there was fascination in it.

--Folly and delusion!--

But Helwyse was only Helwyse, careering through pitchy darkness, on a
viewless sea, with a plausible voice at his ear insinuating villanous
thoughts with an air of devilish good-fellowship!

The "Empire State" was at this moment four and a half miles northeast
of the schooner whose bowsprit she was destined to carry away. The
steamer was making about ten knots an hour: the schooner was slowly
drifting with the tide into the line of the steamer's course. The
catastrophe was therefore about twenty-seven minutes distant.




IX.

THE VOICE OF DARKNESS.


The fog-whistle screeched dismally. Helwyse took his feet off the
camp-stool in front of him, and sat upright.

"Do you know this secret of sin?" he asked.

"It must, of course, be an object of speculation to a thoughtful man,"
answered the voice, modestly parrying the question. "But I assure you
that only a man of intellect--of genius--has in him the intelligence,
the sublime reach of soul, which could attain the full solution of the
problem; they who merely blunder into it would fail to grasp the grand
significance of the idea."

"But you affirm that whoever fairly masters the problem of absolute
sin would have God and His kingdom at his mercy?"

"I am loath to appear boastful; but I apprehend the fact to be not
unlike what you suggest," the voice replied, with a subdued gusto. "It
would depend upon our hypothetical person's discretion, and his views
as to the claims of the august Being who has so long controlled the
destinies of the human race, how much the existing order of things
might have to fear from him. I should imagine that the august Being,
if He be as wise as they say He is, would be careful how He treated
this hypothetical person!"

"You are a liar," said Helwyse, unceremoniously. "Why is not Satan,
who must possess this all-powerful knowledge, supreme over the
universe?"

Instead of taking offence (as Helwyse, to do him justice, hoped it
would; for his Berserker blood, which boiled only at heaven-and-hell
temperature, was beginning to stir in him),--so far from being
offended, the voice only uttered its peculiar quiet chuckle.

"Your frankness charms me! it proves you worthy to learn.
Satan--supposing there be such a personage--divides, with the other
august Being, the sovereignty of the spiritual world. Were I a cynic,
I should say he owned at least half of the physical world into the
bargain! But Satan is only a spirit, and his power over men is but as
the power of a dream. Were a Satan to arise in the flesh, so that men
could see and touch him, and hear his voice with their fleshy
ears,--there were a Satan! Already has the Incarnation of goodness
appeared to mankind, and, though the world be moved to virtue only
slowly and with reluctance, mark how mighty has been his influence!
What think you, then, would be the power of a Christ of evil, showing
to men the path they already grope for? I tell you, the human race
would be his only; Hell, full to bursting with their hurrying souls,
would outweigh Heaven in the balance; the teller of the secret would
be king above all,--forever!"

The sinuous voice twined round the listener's mind, swaddling the
vigorous limbs into imbecile inertia. But when before now did a sane
human brain let itself be duped by sophistry? This case were worth
marking, if only because it is unparalleled.

"And the only punishable sin is ignorance!" muttered Helwyse.

"Well, I have thought so, too. And I have questioned whether a man
might have power over himself, to put his hand to evil or to good
alike, and to remain impartial and impassive; and so make evil and
good alike minister to his culture and raise him upwards!"

"The question does credit to your wit," chimed in the voice of
darkness. "Whoever has in him the making of a deity must learn the
nature of opposites. The soldier will not join battle without studying
the tactics of the enemy. Without experimental knowledge of both evil
and good, none but a fool would believe that man can become
all-powerful."

"From the care with which you avoid speaking the name of God, if from
no other cause, I should suppose you to be the Devil himself!"
observed Helwyse, bluntly.

"Well, profanity is vulgar! As to my being the Devil, it is too dark
here for either denial or acknowledgment to be of practical use. But
(to be serious)--about this secret--"

The voice paused interrogatively. Lucifer, speaking through Helwyse's
lips, demanded sullenly,--

"Well, what is the secret?"

What, indeed! Why, there is no such secret;--it is a bugbear! But the
moral perversion of the person who could soberly ask the question that
Helwyse asked is not so easily disposed of. It met, indeed, with full
recognition. As for the subtile voice, having accomplished its main
purpose, it began now to evade the point and to run into digressions;
until the collision came, and ended the conversation forever.

"Unfortunately," said the voice, "the secret is not such as may be
told in a word. Like all profound knowledge, it can only be
communicated by leading the learner, step by step, over the ground
traversed by the original discoverer. Let me, as a sort of
preliminary, suppose a case."

Hereupon ensued a considerable silence, and Helwyse seemed once more a
detached atom, flying through infinite darkness without guide or
control. Where was he?--what was he? Did the world exist,--the broad
earth, the sunny sky, the beauty, the sound, the order and sweet
succession of nature? Was he a shadow that had dreamed for a moment a
strange dream, and would anon be quenched, and know what had seemed
Self no more? Strangely, through the doubt and uncertainty, Helwyse
felt the pressure of his shoulders against the cabin wall, and the
touch of the dead cigar between his fingers.

The voice, resuming, restored him to a reality that seemed less
trustworthy than the doubt. The tone was not quite the same as
heretofore. The smooth mocking had given place to a hurried
excitement, alien to the philosophic temperament.

"A man kidnaps the child of his enemy, through the child to revenge
himself. Kill it?--no! he is no short-sighted bungler; he has
refinement, foresight, understanding. She is but an infant,--open and
impressible, warm and sanguine! He isolates her from sight and reach.
He pries into her nature with keenest delicacy,--no leaf is unread.
Being learnt, he works upon it; touches each budding trait with
gentlest impulse. No violence! he seems to leave her to her own
development; yet nothing goes against his will. More than half is left
to nature, but his scarce perceptible touches bias nature. Ah! the
idealization of education!"

"This sounds more real than hypothetical!" thought Helwyse.

"So cunning was he, he reversed in her mind the universal law. Evil
was good; good, evil. She grew fast and strong, for evil is the
sweeter food; it is rich earth to the plant. She never knew that evil
existed, yet evil was all she knew! For whatever is forced reacts; he
never taught her positive sin, lest she perversely turn to good."

"Did he mean insensibly to initiate her into the knowledge of absolute
sin?"

"Such would be his purpose,--such would be his purpose. To make her a
devil, without the chance of knowing it possible to be anything else!"

"He was a fool," growled Helwyse. "The plan is folly,--impracticable
in twenty ways. A soul cannot be so influenced. Devils are not made by
education. The only devil would be the educator!"

But the voice had forgotten his presence. It ceased not to mutter to
itself while he was speaking, and now it broke forth again.

"Years have passed,--she is a woman now. She knows not that the world
exists. All is yet latent within her. But the time is at hand when the
hidden forces shall flower! Plunged into life, with nothing to hold
by, no truth, no divine help; her marvellous powers and passions in
full strength,--all trained to drag her down,--not one aspiring,
maddened by new thoughts, limitless opportunities opening before
her,--she will plunge into such an abyss of sin as has been undreamt
of since the Deluge!"

"Well,--what of it? what is the upshot?" questioned Helwyse with
sullen impatience. The emotion now apparent in the voice, uncanny
though it was, counteracted the spell wrought by its purely
intellectual depravity. Helwyse was perhaps beginning to understand
that he had ventured his stock of virgin gold for a handful of unclean
waste-paper!

"He will come back,--her father,--my enemy! I have waited for him from
youth to age. I have seen him in my dreams, and in visions. I am with
him continually,--we talk together. At first, cringingly and softly, I
lead him to recall the past, to speak of the dead wife,--the lost
child,--her baby ways and words. I lure him on till imagination has
fired his love and given life and vividness to his memory. Then I
whisper,--She lives! she is near! in a moment he shall behold her! And
while his heart beats and he trembles, I bring her forth in her
beauty. Take her! your daughter! the one devil on earth; but devils
shall spring like grass in the track of her footsteps!"

The voice had worked itself into a frenzy, and, forgetting caution,
had crazily exposed itself. Its owner was probably some poor lunatic,
subject to fits of madness. But Helwyse was full of scorn and anger,
born of that bitterest disappointment which admits not even the poor
consolation of having worthily aspired. He had been duped,--and by the
cobwebs of a madman's brain! He broke into a short laugh, harsh to the
ear, and answering to no mirthful impulse.

"So! you are the hero of your story? You have brooded all your life
over a crazy scheme of stabbing a father through his child, until you
have become as blind as you are vicious! As for the girl, you may have
made her ignorant and stupid, or even idiotic; but that she should
become queen of Hell or anything of that kind--"

He stopped, for his unseen companion was evidently beyond hearing him.
The man seemed to be actually struggling in a fit,--gasping and
choking. It was a piteous business,--not less piteous than revolting.
But Helwyse felt no pity,--only ugly, hateful, unrelenting anger,
needing not much stirring to blaze forth in fearful passion. Where now
were his wise saws,--his philosophic indifference? Self-respect is the
pith of such supports; which being gone, the supports fail.

"My music,--my music!" gasped the voice; "my music, or I shall die!"

"Die? Yes, it were well you should die. You cumber the earth! Shall I
do it?" Helwyse muttered to his heart,--"merely as a means of
culture!"

Perhaps it was said only in a mood of sardonic jesting. The next
moment, no doubt, Balder Helwyse would have retired to his cabin,
leaving the voice of darkness forever. But at that moment the hurried
flash of a lantern on the captain's bridge fell full on the young
man's face and shoulders, gleaming in his eyes, and lighting up the
masses of yellow hair and mighty beard. He was standing with one hand
resting on the taffrail. The dim halo of the fog, folding him about,
made him look like a spirit.




X.

HELWYSE RESISTS THE DEVIL.


As the light so fell, hoarse voices shouted, and then a concussion
shivered through the steamer, and her headway was slackened. But of
this Helwyse knew nothing; for the voice had burst forth in a cry of
fear, amazement, and hate; and in another breath he found himself
clutched tightly in long, wiry arms, and felt panting breath hot
against his face.

He struggled at first to free himself,--but he was held in the grip of
a madman! Then did the turbid current of his blood begin to leap and
tingle, and strange half-thoughts darted through his mind like
deformed spectres, capering as they flew! The bulwark of his will was
overthrown; he could not poise himself long enough to recover his
self-sway. He was sliding headlong down a steep, the velocity momently
increasing.

Was it Balder Helwyse that was struggling thus furiously, his body
full of fire, his brain of madness, his heart quick-beating with
savage, wicked, thirsty joy? His soul--his own no longer--was
bestridden by a frantic demon, who, brimming over with hot glee,
drove him whirling blindly on, with an ever-growing purpose that
surcharged each smallest artery, and furnished a condensed dart of
malice wherewith to stab and stab again the opposing soul. He waxed
every instant madder, wickeder, more devilishly exultant; and now,
although panting, breathless, pricking at every pore from the agony of
the strain, he could scarce forbear screaming with delight! for he
felt he was gaining, and--O ecstasy!--knew that his adversary felt it
also, and that his heart was as full of black despair and terror as
was his conqueror's of intolerable triumph! Gaining still!

Strange, that all through this wild frenzy in which body and soul were
rapt, the essential part of Balder Helwyse seemed to be looking on,
with a curious, repellent twist of feature, commenting on what was
going forward, and noting, with quiet interest and precision, each
varying phase of the struggle,--noting, as of significance, that the
sway of the demon of murder made the idea of other crimes seem beyond
words congenial, enticing, delicious!

Steadily through this storm of lawless fury has the predestined
victory been drawing near! The throbbing of his enemy's
heart,--Helwyse feels it; did ever lover so rejoice in the
palpitations of his mistress? O the wine of life! drunk from the cup
of murder! Hear how the wretch's voice breaks choking from his
throat!--he would beg for mercy, but cannot, shall not! Keep your
fingers in his throat; the other hand creeps warily downwards. Now
hurl him up,--over!--

       *       *       *       *       *

But with what an ugly gulp the black water swallowed his body!




XI.

A DEAD WEIGHT.


Was it not well done? Tempted to covet imaginary wickedness, Helwyse
was ripe for real crime,--and who so worthy to suffer as the tempter?

He leaned panting against taffrail. His predominant feeling was that
he had been ensnared. His judgment had been drugged, and he had been
lured on to evil. An infamous conspiracy!

His breath regained, he stood upright and in a mechanical manner
arranged his disordered dress. His haversack was gone,--had been torn
from his shoulders and carried overboard. An awkward loss! for it
contained, among other things, valuable letters and papers given him
by his father; not to mention a note-book of his own, and Uncle
Glyphic's miniature. His dead enemy had carried off the proofs of his
murderer's identity!

Not till now did Helwyse become aware of an unusual tumult on the
steamer. Had they seen the deed?--He stood with set teeth, one hand on
the taffrail. Rather than be taken alive, he would leap over!

But it soon became evident that the nucleus of excitement was
elsewhere. The "Empire State" was at a stand-still. Captain and mates
were shouting to one another and at the sailors. By the flying light
of the lanterns Helwyse caught glimpses of the sails and tall masts of
a schooner. He began to comprehend what had happened.

"Thank God! that saves me," he said with a sense of relaxation. Then
he turned and peered fearfully into the black abyss beyond the stern.
Nothing there! nothing save the heavy breathing of remorseless waves.

The statistics of things God has been thanked for,--what piquant
instances would such a collection afford! Any unusual stir of emotion
seems to impel a reference to something higher than the world. Only a
bloodless calm appears to be secure from God's interference. It is
worthy of remark that this was the first time in Helwyse's career--at
least since his arrival at years of discretion--that he had thanked
God for anything. This was not owing to his being of a specially
ungrateful disposition, but to peculiar ideas upon the subject of a
Supreme Being. God, he believed, was no more than the highest phase of
man; and in any man of sufficient natural endowment, he saw a possible
God; just as every American citizen is a possible President! What is
of moment at present, however, is the fact that the young man's first
inconsistency of word with creed dates at the time his self-control
forsook him on board the midnight steamer.

In that thanksgiving prayer his passion passed away. After unnaturally
distending every sense and faculty, it suddenly ebbed, leaving the
consciousness of an irritating vacuum. Something must be done to fill
it. One drawback to crime seems to be its insufficiency to itself. It
creates a craving which needs must be fed. The demon returns,
demanding a fresh task; and he returns again forever!

Helwyse, therefore, plunged into the midst of the uproar consequent on
the collision, and tried to absorb the common excitement,--to identify
himself with other men; no longer to be apart from them and above
them. But he did not succeed. It seemed as though he would never feel
excitement or warmth in the blood again! His deed was a dead weight
that steadied him spite of his best efforts. His aim has hitherto
been, not to forget himself;--let him forget himself now if he can!

The uproar was over all too soon, and the steamer once more under way.

"No serious harm done, sir!--no harm done!" observed a spruce steward.

"No; no harm."

"By the way, sir,--thought I heard some one sing out aft just afore we
struck. You heard it, sir? Thought some fellow'd gone overboard, may
be!"

"I saw no one," answered Helwyse; nor had he. But he turned away,
fearing that the brisk steward might read prevarication in his face.
No, he had seen no one; but he had heard a plunge! He revolted from
the memory of it, but it would not be banished. Had there been a soul
in the body before it made that dive? even for a few minutes
afterwards? He would have given much to know! In theorizing about
crime, he had always maintained the motive to be all in all. But now,
though unable to controvert the logic of his assertion, he felt it
told less than the whole truth. He recognised a divine conservative
virtue in straws, and grasped at the smallest! Through the long
torture of self-questioning and indecision, let us not follow him.
Uncertainty is a ghastly element in such a matter.

He groped his way back to the taffrail. Why, he knew not; but there he
was at last. He might safely soliloquize now; there was no listener.
He might light a cigar and smoke; no one would see him. Yet, no; for,
on second thoughts, his cigars had gone with the haversack!

He bent over the slender iron railing. Where was--it now? Miles away
by this time, swinging, swaying down--down--down to the bottom of the
Sound! Slowly turning over as it sinks, its arms now thrown out, now
doubled underneath; the legs sprawling helplessly; the head wagging
loosely on the dead neck. Down--down, pitching slowly head forwards;
righting, and going down standing, the hair floating straight on end.
Down! O, would it never be done sinking--sinking--sinking? Was the sea
deep as Hell?

But when it reached the bottom, would it rest there? No, not even
there. It would drift uneasily about for a while on the dark sand, the
green gloom of the water above it. Every hour it would grow less and
less heavy; by and by it would begin slowly to rise--rise! Horrible it
looked now; not like itself, that had been horrible enough before.
Rising,--rising. O fearful thing! why come to tell dead men's tales
here? You are done with the world. What wants mankind with you?
Begone! sink, and rise no more! It will not sink; still it rises, and
the green gloom lightens as it slowly buoys upwards. The light rests
shrinkingly on it, revealing the dreadful features. The limbs are no
longer pliant, but stiff,--terribly stiff and unyielding. Still it
rises, nearer and nearer to the surface. See where the throat was
gripped! Up it comes at last in the morning sun, among the sparkling,
laughing, pure blue waves,--the swollen, dead thing!--dead in the
midst of the world's life, hideous amidst the world's beauty. It bobs
and floats, and will sink no more; would rise to heaven if it could!
No need for that. The tide takes it and creeps stealthily with it
towards the shore, and casts it, with shudder and recoil, upon the
beach. There it lies.

Such visions haunted Helwyse as he leaned over the taffrail. He had
not suspected, at starting, upon how long a voyage he was bound. How
many hours might it be since he and the cook had so merrily dined
together? Was such a contrast possible? Surely no more monstrous
delusion than this of Time ever imposed upon mankind! For months and
years he jogs on with us, a dull and sober-paced pedestrian. Then
comes a sudden eternity! But Time thrusts a clock in our faces, and
shows us that the hands have marked a minute only. Shall we put faith
in him?

Helwyse suffered from a vivid imagination. He went not to his room
that night. He kept the deck, and tried to talk with the men,
following them about and asking aimless questions, until they began to
give him short answers. Where were his pride and his serene
superiority to the friendship or enmity of his race? where his
philosophic self-criticism and fanciful badinage? his resolute,
conquering eyes? his bearing of graceful, careless authority? Had all
these attributes been packed in his haversack, and cast with that upon
the waters? and would they, no more than he to whose care they had
been intrusted, ever return?

With each new hour, morning seemed farther off. In his objectless
wanderings, Helwyse came to the well of the engine-room and hung over
it, gazing at the bright, swift-sliding machinery, studying the parts,
tracing the subtle transmission of force from piece to piece. Here at
last was companionship for him! The engine was a beautiful
combination,--so polished, effective, and logical; like the minds of
some philosophers, moving with superhuman regularity and power, but
lifeless!

Helwyse watched it long, till finally its monotony wearied him. It was
doing admirable work, but it never swerved from its course at the call
of sentiment or emotion. Its travesty of life was repulsive. Machinery
is the most admirable invention of man, but is modelled after no
heavenly prototype, and will have no part in the millennium. It seems
to annul space and time, yet gives us no taste of eternity. Man lives
quicker by it, but not more. With another kind of weapon must the true
victory over matter be achieved!




XII.

MORE VAGARIES.


Most benign and beautiful was the morning. The "Empire State" emerged
from the fog and left it, a rosy cloud, astern. The chasing waves
sparkled and danced for joy. The sun was up, fresh and unstained as
yesterday. Night, that had changed so much, had left the sun undimmed.
With the same power and brightness as for innumerable past centuries,
his glorious glance colored the gray sky blue. Helwyse--he was at the
stern taffrail again--looked at the marvellous sphere with unwinking
eyes, until it blurred and swam before him, and danced in colored
rings. It warmed his face, but penetrated no deeper. Looking away,
black suns moved everywhere before his eyes, and the earth looked dim
and shabby, as though blighted by a curse.

Helwyse had not slept, partly from disinclination to the solitude of
his berth, partly because the thought of awakening dismayed him.
Nevertheless, he could scarcely believe in what had happened, now. He
stood upon the very spot; here was the semicircle of railing, the
camp-stools, the white cabin-wall against which he had leaned. But the
blackness of night had so utterly past away that it seemed as though
the deed done in it must in some manner have vanished likewise. What
is fact at one time looks unreal at another. It must be associated
with all times and moods before it can be fully comprehended and
accepted.

Glancing down at the deck, Helwyse saw there the cigar he had been
smoking the night before, flattened out by the tread of a foot, and
lying close beside it a sparkling ring. He picked it up; it was a
diamond of purest water, curiously caught between the mouths of two
little serpents, whose golden and black bodies, twisted round each
other, formed the hoop. Realizing, after a moment, from whose finger
it must have fallen, he had an impulse to fling it far into the sea;
but his second thought was not to part from it. The idea of its former
owner must indeed always be hateful to his murderer; but the bond
between their souls was closer and more indissoluble than that between
man and wife; and of so unnatural a union this ring was a fair emblem.
Unnatural though the union were, to Helwyse it seemed at the time
better than total solitude.

He felt heavy and inelastic,--averse to himself, but still more to
society. He wished to see men and women, yet not to be seen of them.
He had used to be ready in speech, and willing to listen; now, no
subject interested him save one,--on which his lips must be forever
closed. When the sun had made himself thoroughly at home on earth and
in heaven, Helwyse went to his state-room, feeling unclean from the
soul outwards. While making his toilet, he took care to leave the
window-blind up, that he might at any time see the blue sky and water,
and the bright shore, with its foliage and occasional houses. He
shrank from severing, even for an instant, his communication with the
beneficent spirit of nature. And yet Nature could not comfort him,--in
his extremest need he found her most barren. He had been wont to
rejoice in her as the creature of his own senses; but when he asked
her to sympathize with his pain, she laughed at him,--the magnificent
coquette!--and bade him, since she was only the reflection of himself,
be content with his own sympathy. Truly, if man and Nature be thus
allied, and God be but man developed, then is self-sufficiency the
only virtue worth cultivating, and idolatry must begin at home!

His efforts to improve his appearance were not satisfactory; the loss
of his toilet articles embarrassed him not a little; and he, moreover,
lacked zest to enter into the business with his customary care. And
what he did was done not merely for his own satisfaction, as
heretofore, but with an eye to the criticisms of other people. His
naively unconscious independence had got a blow. After doing his best
he went out, pale and heavy-eyed, the diamond ring on his finger.

The passengers had begun to assemble in the cabin. It seemed to
Helwyse, as he entered, that one and all turned and stared at him with
suspicious curiosity. He half expected to see an accuser rise up and
point a dreadful finger at him. But in truth the sensation he created
was no more than common; it was his morbid sensitiveness, which for
the first time took note of it. He had been accustomed to look at
himself as at a third person, in whose faults or successes he was
alike interested; but although his present mental attitude might have
moved him to smile, he, in fact, felt no such impulse. The hue of his
deed had permeated all possible forms of himself, thus barring him
from any standpoint whence to see its humorous aspect. The sun would
not shine on it!

As time passed on, however, and no one offered to denounce him,
Helwyse began to be more at ease. Seeing the steward with whom he had
spoken the night before, he asked him whereabouts he supposed the
schooner was.

"O, she'll be in by night, sir, safe enough. Wind's freshened up a
good bit since; wouldn't take her long to rig a new bowsprit. Beg
pardon, sir, did you happen to know the party next door to you?"

"I know no one. What about him?"

"Can't find him nowhere, sir. Door locked this morning; hadn't used
his bed; must have come aboard, for there was a violin lying on the
bed in a black box, for all the world like a coffin, sir. Queer, ain't
it?"

The steward was called away, but Helwyse's uneasiness had returned.
Did this fellow suspect nothing? The student of men could not read his
face; the power of insight seemed to have left him. Reason could tell
him that it was impossible he should be suspected, but reason no
longer satisfied him.

He left the cabin and once more sought the deck, harried and anxious.
Why could not he be stolid and indifferent, as were many worse
criminals than he? Or was his disquiet a gauge of his moral
accountability? By as much as he was more finely gifted than other
men, was the stain of sin upon his soul more ineffaceable? Last night,
ignorance was the only evil; but had he been satisfied with less
wisdom, might he not have sinned with more impunity? Nevertheless,
Balder Helwyse would hardly have been willing to purchase greater ease
at the price of being less a man.

The steamer descended the narrow and swift current of East River,
rounded Castle Garden, and reached her pier before eight o'clock.
Shoulder to shoulder with the other passengers, Helwyse descended the
gangplank. The official who took his ticket eyed him so closely that
there was the beginning of an impulse in his weary brain to knock the
fellow down. Finding himself not interfered with, however, he passed
on to the rattling street, beginning to understand that the attention
he excited was not owing to a visible brand of Cain, but to his beard
and hair which were at variance with the fashion of that day. He was
neither more nor less a cynosure than at other times. But he was more
sensitive to notice, and it now occurred to him that his unique
appearance was unsafe as well as irksome. Were a certain body found,
in connection with evidence more or less circumstantial, how readily
might he be pointed out! He fancied himself reading the description in
a newspaper, and realized how many and how easily noted were his
peculiarities. His carelessness of public remark had been folly. The
sooner his peculiarities were amended, the better!

At the corner of the street stood a couple of policemen,--ponderous,
powerful men, able between them to carry to jail the most refractory
criminal. One path was open to Helwyse, whereby to recover his
self-respect, and regain his true footing with the world; and that led
into the hands of those policemen! With a revulsion of feeling perhaps
less strange than it seems, he walked up to them, resolved to
surrender himself on a charge of murder. It was the simplest issue to
his embarrassments.

"Policemen!" he began, with a return of his assured voice and
bearing. They stared at him, and one said, "How?"

"Direct me to the best hotel near here!" said Helwyse.

They stared, and told him the way to the Astor House.

There had been but the briefest hesitation in Helwyse's mind, but
during that pause he had reconsidered his resolve and said No to it.
Remembering some episodes of his past history, he cannot hastily be
accused of vulgar fear of death. In his case, indeed, it may have
required more courage to close his mouth than to open it. Be that as
it might, the question as to the degree and nature of his guilt was
still unsettled in his mind. Moreover, had he been clear on this
point, he yet distrusted the competence of human laws to do him
justice. He shrank from surrender, less as affecting his person than
as superseding his judgment. But, failing himself and mankind, to what
other court can he appeal? Should the fitting tribunal appear, will he
have the nerve to face it?

He did not go to the Astor House, notwithstanding the trouble he had
taken to ask his way thither. He coasted along the more obscure
thoroughfares, seeming to find something congenial in them. Here were
people, many of whom had also committed crimes, whose eyes he need
not shun to meet, who were his brethren. To be sure, they gave him no
friendly glances, taking him for some dainty aristocrat, whom idle
curiosity had led to their domains. But Helwyse knew the secret of his
kinship; and he perhaps indulged a wild momentary dream of proclaiming
himself to them, entering into their life, and vanishing from that
world that had known him heretofore. It is a shorter step than is
generally supposed, from human height to human degradation.

A pale girl with handsome features, careless expression, and somewhat
disordered hair, leant out of a low window, her loose dress falling
partly open from her bosom as she did so.

"Where are you going, my love?" inquired she, with a professionally
attractive smile. "Aren't you going to give me a lock of that sweet
yellow hair?--there's a duck!"

It so happened that Helwyse had never before been openly accosted by a
member of this class of the community. Was this infringement of the
rule the result of his own fall, or of the girl's exceptional
effrontery? He had an indignant glance ready poised, but forbore to
hurl it! The worst crime of the young woman was that she disposed of
herself at a rate of remuneration exactly corresponding to the value
of the commodity; whereas he, less economical and orderly, had
mortgaged his own soul by disposing of some one else's body, and was,
if anything, out of pocket by the transaction! Undoubtedly the young
woman had the best of it; very likely, had she been aware of the
circumstances, she would not have deigned him so much as a smile. He
therefore neither yielded to her solicitations nor rebuked them, but
passed on. The adventure rectified his fraternizing impulse. Albeit
standing accountant for so great a sin, the mire was as yet alien to
him.

But there was pertinence in the young woman's question; where was he
going, indeed? Since the catastrophe on board the steamer, he had
forgotten Doctor Glyphic. He felt small inclination to meet his
relative now; but certain considerations of personal interest no
longer wore the same color as yesterday. Robbed of his self-respect,
he could ill afford to surrender worldly wealth into the bargain. On
the other hand, to palm himself off on his uncle for a true man was
adding hypocrisy to his other crime.

Such an objection, however, could hardly have turned the scale. Great
crimes are magnets of smaller ones. It was necessary for Helwyse to
alter the whole scheme of his life-voyage; and since he had failed in
beating up against the wind, why not make all sail before it?
Meanwhile, it was easier to call on Doctor Glyphic than to devise a
new course of action; and thus, had matters been allowed to take their
natural turn, mere inertia might have brought about their meeting.

But the irony of events turns our sternest resolves to ridicule. On
the next street-corner was a hair-dresser's shop, its genial little
proprietor, plump and smug, rubbing his hands and smiling in the
doorway. Beholding the commanding figure of the yellow-bearded young
aristocrat, afar off, his professional mouth watered over him. What a
harvest for shears and razor was here! Dare he hope that to him would
be intrusted the glorious task of reaping it?

As Helwyse gained the corner, his weary eyes took in the smiling
hair-dresser, the little room beyond cheerful with sunshine and
colored paper-hangings, and the padded chair for customers to recline
in. Here might he rest awhile, and rise up a new man,--a stranger to
himself and to all who had known him. It was fitting that the inward
change should take effect without; not to mention that the wearing of
so conspicuous a mane was as unsafe as it was unsuitable.

He entered the shop, therefore,--the proprietor backing and bowing
before him,--and sat down with a sigh in the padded chair. Immediately
he was enveloped in a light linen robe, a towel was tucked in round
his neck by deft caressing fingers, the soothing murmur of a voice was
in his ear, and presently sounded the click-click of shears. The
descendant of the Vikings closed his eyes and felt comfortable.

The peculiar color and luxuriance of Balder's hair and beard were
marked attributes of the Helwyse line. In these days of ponderous
genealogies, who would be surprised to learn that the family sprang
from that Balder, surnamed the Beautiful, who was the sun-god of
Scandinavian mythology? Certain of his distinctive characteristics,
both physical and mental, would appear to have been perpetuated with
marvellous distinctness throughout the descent; above all, the golden
locks, the blue eyes, and the sunny disposition.

For the rest, so far as sober history can trace them back, they seem
to have been a noble and adventurous race of men, loving the sea, but
often taking a high part in the political affairs of the nation. The
sons were uniformly fair, but the daughters dark,--owing, it was said,
to the first mother of the line having been a dark-eyed woman. But the
advent of a dark-eyed heir had been foretold from the earliest times,
not without ominous (albeit obscure) hints as to the part he would
play in the family history. The precise wording of none of these old
prophecies has come down to us; but they seem in general to have
intimated that the dark-eyed Helwyse would bring the race to a ruinous
and disgraceful end, saving on the accomplishment of conditions too
improbable to deserve recording. The dead must return to life, the
living forsake their identity, love unite the blood of the victim to
that of the destroyer,--and other yet stranger things must happen
before the danger could be averted.

The superstitious reverence paid to enigmatical utterances of this
kind has long ago passed away; and, if any meaning ever attaches to
them, it is apt to be sadly commonplace. Nevertheless, when Balder was
born, and the hereditary blue eyes were found wanting, the
circumstance was doubtless the occasion of much half-serious banter
among those to whom the ominous prophecies were familiar. Certainly
the young man had already made one grave mistake; and he could hardly
have followed it up by a more disgraceful retreat than this to the
hair-dresser's saloon. The ghosts of his heroic forefathers in
Valhalla would disown his shorn head with indignant scorn; for their
golden locks had ever been sacred to them as their honor. When the
Roman Empire was invaded by the Goths and Vandals, a Helwyse--so runs
the tale--was taken prisoner and brought before the Roman General. The
latter summoned a barber and a headsman, and informed the captive that
he might choose between forfeiting his head, and that which grew upon
it. As to the precise words in which the Northern warrior couched his
reply, historians vary; but they are agreed on the important point
that his head was chopped off without delay!

Did the memory of these things bring no blush to Balder's cheeks?
There he sat, as indifferent, to all outward seeming, as though he
were asleep. But this may have been the apathy consequent on the
abandonment of lofty pretensions and sublime ambitions; betraying
proud sensitiveness rather than base lack of feeling. Balder Helwyse
was not the first man of parts to appear in an undignified and
unheroic light. The foremost man of all this world once whined like a
sick girl for his physic, and preposterously overestimated his
swimming powers; yet his greatness found him out!

In sober earnest, however, what real importance attaches to Helwyse's
doings at this juncture? Physically and mentally weary, he may have
acted from the most ordinary motives. As to his entertaining any
superstitious crotchets about having his hair cut,--the spirit of the
age forbid it!




XIII.

THROUGH A GLASS.


The hair-dresser had the quality--now rare among his class--of
unlimited and self-enjoying loquacity; soothing, because its little
waves lapsed in objectless prattle on the beach of the apprehension,
to be attended to or not at pleasure. The sentences were without
regular head or tail, and were connected by a friendly arrangement
between themselves, rather than by any logical sequence; while the
recurring pauses at interesting epochs of work wrought a recognition
of how caressing had been the easy voice, and accumulated a lazy
disposition to hear it continue.

After decking Helwyse for the sacrifice, he had murmured
confidentially in his ear, "Hair, sir?--or beard, sir?--or
both?--little of both, sir? Just so. Hair first, please, sir. Love-ly
morning!"

And thereupon began to clip and coo and whisk softly about, in the
highest state of barberic joy. As he worked, inspired by the curly,
flowing glossy locks which, to his eye, called inarticulately for the
tools of his trade, his undulating monologue welled forth until
Coleridge might have envied him. Helwyse heard the sound, but let the
words go by to that unknown limbo whither all sounds, good or bad,
have been flying since time began.

By and by the hair was done; there ensued a plying of brushes, a
blowing down the neck, and a shaking out of the linen apron.

"Will you cast your eyes on the mirror now, sir, please?"

"No,--go on and finish, first," replied Helwyse; and forthwith a
cushion was insinuated beneath his head, and his feet were elevated
upon a rest. He heard the preparation of the warm lather, and anon the
knowing strapping of a razor. He put up his hand and stroked his beard
for the last time, wondering how he would look without it.

"Never saw the like before, sir; must have annoyed you dreadful!"
remarked the commiserating barber, as he passed the preparatory
scissors round his customer's jaw, mowing the great golden sheaf at
one sweep. He spoke of it as though it were a cancer or other painful
excrescence, the removal of which would be to the sufferer a boon
unspeakable.

Helwyse's face expressed neither anguish nor relief; he presently lost
himself in thoughts of his own, only returning to the perception of
outside things when the barber asked him whether he, also, had ever
attended camp-meeting; the subject being evidently one which had been
held forth upon for some time past.

"No?" continued the little man who by long practice had acquired a
wonderful power of interpreting silence. "Well, it's a great thing,
sir; and a right curious thing is experiencing religion, too! A great
blessing I've found it, sir; there's a peace dwells with me, as the
minister says, right along all the time now. Does the razor please
you, sir? Ah! I was a wild and godless being once, although always
reckoned a smart hand with the razor;--Satan never took my cunning
hand, as the poet says, away from me. Yes, there was a time when I was
how-d' y'-do with all the bloods around the place, and a good business
I used to do out of them, too, sir; but religion is a peace there's no
understanding, as the Good Book says; and if I don't make all I used
to, I save twice as much,--and that's the good of it, sir. Beau-ti-ful
chin is yours, sir, I declare!"

"Do you believe in the orthodox faith?" demanded Helwyse; "in
miracles, and the Trinity, and so forth?"

"Everything we're told to believe in I believe, I hope, sir; and as
quick as I hear anything more, why, I'm ready to believe that also,
provided only it comes through orthodox channels, as the saying is.
Ah, sir, it's the unquestioning belief that brings the happiness. I
wouldn't have anything explained to me, not if I could! and my faith
is such, that what goes against it I never would believe, not if you
proved it to me black and white, sir! Love-ly skin you've got,
sir,--it's just like a woman's. The intellect is a snare, that's what
it is,--ah, yes! You think with me, sir, don't you?"

But Helwyse had relapsed into silence. The little hair-dresser was
happy, was he?--happy, and hopeful, and conscious of spiritual
progress?--had no misgivings and feared no danger,--because he had
eliminated reason from his scheme of religion! Divine reason,--could
man live without it? A snare?--Well, had not Balder found it so?

True, that was not reason's fault, but his who misused reason. True,
also, that he who believed on others' authority believed not ideas but
men, and was destitute of self-reliance or dignity. Yet the
hair-dresser seemed to find in that very dependence his best
happiness, and to have built up a factitious self-respect from the
very ruin of true dignity. His position was the antipodes of Balder's,
yet, if results were evidence, it was tenable and more successful.

This plump, superficial, smiling little hair-dresser was a person of
no importance, yet it happened to him to modify not only Helwyse's
external aspect, but the aspect of his mind as well,--by the
presentation of a new idea; for strange to say, Helwyse had never
chanced to doubt that seraphim were higher than cherubim, or that
independence was the only ladder to heaven. To be taught by one
avowedly without intellect is humiliating; but the experience of many
will furnish examples of a singular disregard of this kind of
proprieties.

When the shaving was done to the artist's satisfaction, he held the
mirror before his customer's face. Helwyse looked narrowly at his
reflection, as was natural in making the acquaintance of one who was
to be his near and intimate companion. He beheld a set of features
strongly yet gracefully built, but shorn of a certain warm, manly
attractiveness. The immediate visibility of mouth and chin--index of
so large a part of man's nature--startled him. He was dismayed at the
ease wherewith the working of emotion might now be traced. Man wholly
unveiled to himself is indeed an awful spectacle, be the
dissection-room that of the surgeon or of the psychologist. Hardly
might angels themselves endure it. A measure of ignorance of ourselves
is wise, because consciousness of a weakness may lead us to give it
rein. Perfect strength can coexist only with perfect knowledge, but
neither is attainable by man. Man should pay to be screened from
himself, lest his sword fail,--lest the Gorgon's head on his breast
change him to stone.

The gracious, outflowering veil of Balder Helwyse's life had vanished,
leaving nakedness. Henceforth he must depend on fence, feint and
guard, not on the downright sword-stroke. With Adam, the fig-leaf
succeeded innocence as a garment; for Helwyse, artificial address must
do duty as a fig-leaf. The day of guiltless sincerity was past; gone
likewise the day of open acknowledgment of guilt. Now dawned the day
of counterfeiting,--not always the shortest of our mortal year.

On the whole, Helwyse's new face pleased him not. He felt
self-estranged and self-distrustful. Standing on the borders of a
darker land, the thoughts and deeds of his past life swarmed in review
before his eyes. Many a seeming trifling event now showed as the
forewarning of harm to come. The day's journey once over, we see its
issue prophesied in each trumpery raven and cloud that we have met
since morning. However, the omens would have read as well another way;
for nature, like man, is twofold, and can be as glibly quoted to
Satan's advantage as to God's.

"Very well done!" said Helwyse to the barber, passing a hand over the
close-cropped head and polished chin. "The only trouble is, it cannot
be done once for all."

As the little man smilingly remarked, however, the charge was but ten
cents. His customer paid it and went out, and was seen by the
hair-dresser to walk listlessly up the street. The improvement in his
personal appearance had not mended his spirits. Indeed, it cannot be
disguised that his trouble was more serious than lay within a barber's
skill altogether to set right.

Were man potentially omniscient, then might Balder's late deed be no
crime, but a simple exercise of prerogative. But is knowledge of evil
real knowledge? God is goodness and man is evil. God knows both good
and evil. Man knows evil--knows himself--only; knows God only in so
far as he ceases to be man and admits God. But this simple truth
becomes confused if we fancy a possible God in man.

This was Balder's difficulty. Possessed of a strong, comprehensive
mind, he had made a providence of himself; confounded intelligence
with integrity; used the moral principle not as a law of action but as
a means of insight. The temptation so to do is strong in proportion as
the mind is greatly gifted. But experience shows no good results from
yielding to it. Blind moral instinct, if not safer, is more
comfortable!

Not the deed alone, but the revelation it brought, preyed on the young
man's peace. If he were a criminal to-day, then was the whole argument
of his past life criminal likewise. Yesterday's deed was the logical
outcome of a course of thought extending over many yesterdays. Why,
then, had not his present gloom impended also, and warned him
beforehand? Because, while parleying with the Devil, he looks angelic;
but having given our soft-spoken interlocutor house-room, he makes up
for lost time by becoming direfully sincere!

On first facing the world in his new guise, Helwyse felt an
embarrassment which he fancied everybody must remark. But, in fact (as
he was not long discovering), he was no longer remarkable; the barber
had wiped out his individuality. It was what he had wished, and yet
his insignificance annoyed him. The stare of the world had put him out
of countenance; yet when it stopped staring he was still unsatisfied.
What can be the solution of this paradox?

It perhaps was the occasion of his seeking the upper part of the city,
where houses were more scarce and there were fewer people to be
unconcerned! In country solitudes he could still be the chief figure.
He entered Broadway at the point where Grace Church stands, and passed
on through the sparsely inhabited region now known as Union Square.
The streets hereabouts were but roughly marked out, and were left in
many places to the imagination. On the corner of Twenty-third Street
was a low whitewashed inn, whose spreading roof overshadowed the
girdling balcony. Farmers' wagons were housed beneath the adjoining
shed, and one was drawn up before the door, its driver conversing with
a personage in shirt-sleeves and straw hat, answering to the name of
Corporal Thompson.

Helwyse perhaps stopped at the Corporal's hospitable little
establishment to rest himself and get some breakfast; but whether or
not, his walk did not end here, but continued up Broadway, and after
passing a large kitchen-garden (whose owner, a stout Dutchman, was
pacing its central path, smoking a long clay pipe which he took from
his lips only to growl guttural orders to the gardeners who were
stooping here and there over the beds), emerged into open country,
where only an occasional Irish shanty broke the solitude.

How long the young man walked he never knew; but at length, from the
summit of a low hill, he looked northwest and saw the gleam of Hudson
River. Leaving the road he struck across rocky fields which finally
brought him to the river-bank. A stony promontory jutted into the
water, and on this (having clambered to its outer extremity) Helwyse
sat down, his feet overhanging the swirling current. The tide was just
past the flood.

About two hundred yards up stream, to the northward, stood a small
wooden house, on the beach in front of which a shabby old mariner was
bailing out his boat. Southwards, some miles away, curved the
shadowed edge of the city, a spire mounting here and there, a
pencilled mist of smoke from chimneys, a fringe of thready masts
around the farthest point. In front slid ceaselessly away the vast
sweep of levelled water, and still it came undiminished on. The
opposing shore was a mile distant, its rocky front gradually gaining
abruptness and height until lost round the northern curve. But
directly opposite Helwyse's promontory, the stony wall was for some
way especially precipitous and high, its lofty brink serried with a
thick phalanx of trees.

This spot finally monopolized the adventurer's attention; had he been
in Germany, he would have looked for gray castle-towers rising behind
the foliage. The place looked inaccessible and romantic, and was
undeniably picturesque. New York was far enough away to be mistaken
for--say--Alexandria; while the broad river certainly took its rise in
as prehistoric an age as the Nile itself. Perhaps in the early morning
of the world some chieftain built his stronghold there, and fought
notable battles and gave mighty feasts; and later married, and begat
stalwart sons, or a daughter beautiful as earth and sky! Where to-day
were her youth and beauty, her loving noble heart, her warm melodious
voice, her eyes full of dark light? Why were there no such women
now?--not warped, imperfect, only half alive in body and spirit; but
charged from the heart outwards with pure divine vitality,--natures
vivid as fire, yet by strength serene!

"Why did not I live when she lived, to marry her?" muttered Helwyse in
a dream. "A woman whose infinite variety age could not alter nor
custom stale! A true wife would have kept me from error. What man can
comprehend the world, if he puts half the world away? Now it is too
late; she might have helped me rise to greatness, but not to bear
disgrace. Ah, Balder Helwyse, poor fool! you babble as if she stood
before you to take or leave. _You_ rise to greatness? You never had
the germs of greatness in you! You are so little that not the goddess
Freya herself could have made you tall! Through what delusion did you
fancy yourself better than any other worm?"

There was an interval, not more than a rod or two in width, in the
tree-hedge which lined the opposite cliff. Through this one might get
a narrow glimpse of what lay beyond. A strip of grassy lawn extended
in front of what seemed to be the stone corner of a house. The
distance obscured detail, but it looked massively built, though not
after the modern style. As Helwise gazed, sharpening his eyes to
discern more clearly, he saw a figure moving across the lawn directly
towards him. Advancing to the brink of the cliff, it there paused and
seemed to return his glance. Helwyse could not tell whether it were
man or woman. Had the river only been narrower!

The next moment he remembered his telescope, and, taking it from its
case, he was at a bound within one hundred yards of the western shore.
Man or woman? he steadied the glass on his knee and looked again. A
woman, surely,--but how strangely dressed! Such a costume had not
been in vogue since Damascus was a new name in men's mouths. Balder
gazed and gazed. Accurately to distinguish the features was
impossible,--tantalizingly so; for the gazer was convinced that she
was both young and beautiful. Her motions, her bearing, the graceful
peculiarity of her garb,--a hundred nameless evidences made it sure.
How delightful to watch her in her unconsciousness! yet Helwyse felt a
delicacy in thus stealing on her without her knowledge or consent. But
the misgiving was not strong enough to shut up his telescope; perhaps
it added a zest to the enjoyment.

"The very princess you were just now dreaming of! the most beautiful
and complete woman! Would I were the prince to win thee!"

This aspiration was whispered, as though its object were within
conversable distance. Balder could be imaginative enough when the
humor took him.

Hardly had the whisper passed his lips when he saw the princess
majestically turn her lovely head, slowly and heedfully, until her
glance seemed directly to meet his own. His cheeks burned; it was as
if she had actually overheard him. Was she gracious or offended? He
saw her stretch towards him her arms, and then, with a gesture of
beautiful power, clasp her hands and draw them in to her bosom.

Prince Balder's hand trembled, the telescope slipped; the quick effort
to regain it lent it an impetus that shot it far into the water. It
had done its work and was gone forever. The beautiful princess was
once more a vague speck across a mile of rapid river; now, even the
speck had moved beyond the trees and was out of sight!

The episode had come so unexpected, and so quickly passed, that now it
seemed never to have been at all! But Helwyse had yielded himself
unreservedly to the influence of the moment. Following so aptly the
fanciful creation of his thought, the apparition had acquired peculiar
significance. The abrupt disappearance afflicted him like a positive
loss.

Did he, then, soberly believe himself and the princess to have
exchanged glances (not to speak of thoughts) across a river a mile
wide? Perhaps he merely courted a fancy from which the test of reason
was deliberately withheld. Spirits not being amenable to material
laws, what was the odds (so far as exchange of spiritual sentiment
was concerned) whether the prince and princess were separated by miles
or inches?

But however plausible the fancy, it was over. Helwyse leaned back on
the rock, drew his hat over his eyes, folded his hands beneath his
head, and appeared to sleep.




XIV.

THE TOWER OF BABEL.


In a perfect state of society, where people will think and act in
harmony with only the purest æsthetic laws, a knowledge of stenography
and photography will suffice for the creation of perfect works of art.
But until that epoch comes, the artist must be content to do the
grouping, toning, and proportioning of his picture for himself, under
penalty of redundancy and confusion. People nowadays seldom do or
think the right thing at the fitting moment; insomuch that the
biographer, if he would be intelligible, must use his own discretion
in arranging his materials.

Now, in view of the rough shaking which late events had given Balder
and his opinions, it is doing no violence to probability to fancy him
taking an early opportunity to pass these opinions in review. It would
be easy, by a glance at the magic ring, to reproduce his meditations
just as they passed through his brain. Brevity and pertinence,
however, counsel us to recall a dialogue which had taken place about
three years before.

Balder and his father were then in the North of England; and the
latter (who never concerned himself with any save the plainest and
most practical philosophy) was not a little startled at an analogy
drawn by his son between the cloud-cap on Helvellyn's head and the
Almighty! Premising that the cloud-cap, though apparently stable, was
really created by the continuous passage of warmer air through a cold
region around the summit of the mountain, whereby it was for a moment
condensed into visibility and then swept on,--having postulated this
fact, and disregarding the elder's remark that he believed not a word
of it,--Balder went on to say that God was only a set of
attributes,--in a word, the perfection of all human attributes,--and
not at all an individual!

"And what has that to do with your cloud-making theory?" demanded
Thor, with scorn.

"The perfect human attributes," replied Balder, unruffled, "correspond
to the region of condensation,--the cold place, you understand."

"Do they? Well?"

"The constant condensation of the warm current from below corresponds
to the taking on of these attributes by a ceaseless succession of
human souls. Filling out the Divine character, they lose identity, and
so make room for others."

"What are these attributes?"

"They are ineffable,--they are omniscience,--the comprehension of the
whole creative idea."

"You expect me to believe that,--eh?" growled Thor.

"If I could believe you understood it, dear old sceptic!" returned
Balder, with affectionate irreverence, throwing his arm across his
father's broad shoulders. "I say that every soul of right capacity,
living for culture, and not afraid of itself, will at last reach that
highest point. It is the sublime goal of man, and no human life is
complete unless in gaining it. Many fail, but not all. I will not! No,
I am not blasphemous; I think life without definite aim not worth
having; and that aim, the highest conceivable."

Thor, having stared in silence at his descendant, came out with a
stentorian Viking laugh, which Balder sustained with perfect
good-humor.

"Ho, ho!--the devil is in you, son!--in those black eyes of
yours,--ho, ho! No other Helwyse ever had such eyes,--or such ideas
either! Well, but supposing you passed the condensation point, what
then?"

Balder, who was entirely in earnest about the matter, answered
gravely,--

"I cease to be; but what was I becomes the pure, life-giving,
spiritual substance, and enters into fresh personalities, and so
passes up again in endless circulation."

"Hum! and how with the evil ones, boy?"

"As with all waste matter; they are cast aside, and, as distinct
souls, are gradually annihilated. But they may still manure the soil,
and involuntarily help the growth of others. Sooner or later, in one
or another form, all come into use."

"For all I see, then," quoth Thor, "your devils come to the same end
as your gods!"

"There is the same kind of difference," returned the philosopher, "as
between light and earth,--both of which help the growth of flowers;
but light gives color and beauty, earth only the insipid matter. I
would rather be the light."

"Another thing," proceeded Thor, ignoring this distinction; "admitting
all else, how do you account for your region of condensation?"

"By the necessity of perfection," answered Balder, after some
consideration. "There would be no meaning in existence unless it
tended towards perfection. But you have hit on the unanswerable
question."

Thor shook his head and huge grizzled beard. "German University
humbug!" growled he. "Get you into a scrape some day. The cloud's not
made in that way, I tell you! Come, let's go back to the inn."

"Take my arm," said Balder; and as together they descended the spur of
the mountain, he added lovingly, "I'll bring no clouds across your
sky, my dear old man!" So the hospitable inn received them.

The discussion between the two was never renewed; but Balder held to
his creed. He elaborated and fortified what had been mere outline
before. No dogma can be conceived which many circumstances will not
seem to confirm and justify. But we cannot attempt to keep abreast of
Balder's deductions. There are as many theological systems as
individual souls; and no system can be wholly apprehended by any one
save its author.

Mastery of men and things,--supreme knowledge to the end of supreme
power,--such seems to have been his ambition,--an ambition too
abstract and lofty for much rivalry. Nature and human nature were at
once his laboratory and his instruments. His senses were to him
outlets of divinity. The good and evil of such a scheme scarce need
pointing out. It was the apotheosis of self-respect; but self-respect
raised to such a height becomes self-worship; human vision dazzles at
the sublimity of the prospect; at the moment of greatest weakness the
soul arrogates invincible power, and falls! For, the mightier man is,
the more absolutely does he need the support of a mightier Man than he
can ever be.

No doubt Balder had often been assailed by doubts and weariness; the
path had seemed too long and arduous, and he had secretly pined for
some swift issue from perplexity and delay. In such a moment was it
that the voice of darkness gained his ear, and, like a will-o'-the-wisp,
lured him to calamity. Verily, it is not easy to be God. Only builders
of the Tower of Babel know the awfulness of its overthrow.

Balder's spirit lay prostrate among the ruins, too stunned and
bewildered to see the reason or justice of his fall. Such a state is
dangerous, for, the better part of the mind being either occupied with
its disaster or stupefied by it, the superficial part is readily moved
to folly or extravagance,--to deeds and thoughts which a saner moment
would scout and ridicule. Well is it, then, if the blind steps are
guided to better foothold than they know how to choose. Angels are
said to be particularly watchful over those who sleep; perhaps, also,
during the darkness which follows on moral perversion.




XV.

CHARON'S FERRY.


After lying motionless for half an hour, Balder suddenly sat upright
and settled his hat on his head. A new purpose had come to him which,
arriving later than it might have done, made him wish to act upon it
without delay.

The old mariner had by this time bailed out his boat, and, having
shipped a mast in the forward thwart, was dropping down stream. As he
neared the promontory Balder hailed him:--

"Hullo! skipper, take me across?"

The skipper, without replying, steered shorewards, the other
clambering down the rock to meet him. After a brief parley, during
which the old fellow closely scrutinized his intending passenger from
head to foot, a bargain was struck, and they put forth, tacking
diagonally across stream. For Balder, having charged his imagination
with castles, warlike chieftains, and beautiful princesses, had
finally arrived at the conclusion that the stone house was an
enchanter's castle; the figure he had seen, an imprisoned lady;
himself, a knight-errant bound to rescue her and give the wicked
enchanter his deserts. This idea possessed his brain for the moment
more vividly than do realities most men. The plumed helmet was on his
head, he glittered with shining arms and sword, his heart warmed and
throbbed with visions of conflict and bold emprise. The commonplace
assumed an aspect of grandeur and magnificence in harmony with his
chivalric mania. The leaky craft in which he sat became a majestic
barge; the skipper, some wrinkled Charon who doubtless had ferried
many a brave knight to his death beneath yonder castle's walls. That
seeming birch-stump on the farther shore was the castle champion,
armed cap-a-pie in silver harness and ready with drawn sword to do
battle against all comers. Trim the sail, ferryman, and steer thy
skilfullest!

The kind of insanity which sees in outward manifestation the fantasies
of the mind is an affection incident at times to every one. An artist
sees beauties in a landscape, an artisan in pulleys and levers, and
either may be so far insane in the eyes of the other. Nature discovers
grandeur, beauty, or truth according as the quality abides in the
seer. In this view Balder or Don Quixote was no more insane than other
people. Their eyes bore true witness to what was in their minds, and
the sanest eyes can do no more. Their minds were, perhaps, out of
focus; but who can cast the first stone?

The skipper, when not masquerading as Charon, was a lean, brown, and
wrinkled old salt, neither complete nor clean of garb, and bulging as
to one lank cheek with a quid of tobacco. At first he sat silent,
dividing his attention between the conduct of his boat and his
passenger.

"Whereabouts will yer land, Captain?" he asked when they were fairly
under way.

"Wherever there is a path upwards. Who is the owner of the castle?"

"The castle? Well, there ain't many rightly knows just what his name
is," answered Charon, cocking his gray eye rather quizzically. "Some
says one thing, some another. I have heard tell he was Davy Jones
himself!"

"Have you ever seen him?"

"Well, I don't know; I've seen something that might have been him; but
there's no telling! he can fix himself up to look like pretty much
anything, they say. There ain't many calls up to the castle, anyway."

"Why not?"

"Well, there's a big wall all around the place, for one thing, and
never a gate in it; so without yer dives under ground and up again,
there don't seem no easy way of getting in."

"Does the owner never come out, then?"

"Well, he can get out, I expect, when he wants to," replied the
wrinkled humorist, with a weather-beaten grin. "They do say he whips
off on a broomstick about once a month and steers for Bos-ton!" His
fashion of utterance was a leisurely sing-song, like the roll of a
vessel anchored in a ground-swell.

"Why does he go there?" demanded Prince Balder, with the air of
finding nothing extravagant or improbable in the sailor's yarn. The
latter (a little doubting whether his interlocutor were a simpleton or
a "deep one") answered, after a moment's pause,--to replenish his
imagination perhaps,--

"Well, in course, I knows nothing what he does; but they do say he
coasts around to all the ho-tels and overhauls the log. He's been
laying for some one this twenty year. My idea, it's about time he
hailed him!"

"What does he want with him?"

"Well, yer see, what folks say is, this chap had played some game or
other off on Davy; so Davy he puts a rod in pickle and vows he'd be
even with the chap, yet.

"Yer see,--I'll tell yer," continued Charon, leaning forward on his
knee and speaking confidentially; "just as this chap was putting
off,--with some of Davy's belongings, likely,--Davy up and cuts a
slice of flesh and blood off him. Well, he takes this slice and fixes
it up one way or another, and makes a witch out of it,--handsome as
she can be,--enough to draw a chap's heart right out through his
jacket. Now, being as she's his own flesh and blood, d' yer see, this
chap I'm telling yer on's bound to come back after her afore he dies.
Well, soon as Davy gets hold on him, he ups with him to the place
yonder and outs with the witch. 'Here yer are, my dear friend!' says
he (as civil as may be), 'here's yer own flesh and blood a-waiting for
yer!' Well, the chap grabs for her, and once he touches her there
ain't no letting go no more. Off she starts on her broomstick, he
along behind, till they gets over Hell gate--" Charon checked himself,
made an ominous downward gesture with his right forefinger, and
emphasized it by spitting solemnly to leeward.

"Did you ever meet him,--this man?" asked Helwyse, rousing himself
from a brown study and looking Charon in the eyes.

"Well, now, I couldn't tell for certain as I ever met him," replied
the other, returning the look with an odd wrinkling of the features.
"But it's nigh on twenty year that I fetched a man across this very
spot, and back again in the evening, that might have been him.
Leastways, he was the last caller ever I took over to that house."

"I am the first since he--eh?"

"Well, yer are; and, Captain,--no offence to you,--but allowing for a
lot of hair he had, he was like enough to you to be yer twin brother!"

"Or even myself! So Davy Jones goes by the name of Doctor Glyphic in
these parts, does he?" said Balder, with a sudden, incisive smile,
which almost cut through the old ferryman's self-possession. The boat
at the same moment glided into a little cove, and the passenger jumped
ashore. Charon stood deferentially touching his weather-stained hat,
too much mystified to speak. But the fare which Helwyse handed him
restored his voice.

"Thank yer, Captain,--thank yer kindly!--hope no offence, Captain,--a
chap picks up a deal of gossip in twenty year, and--"

"No offence in the world!" cried Helwyse; "I take you for a powerful
enchanter, who seems to steer one way, when he is in fact taking his
passenger in another. Where are you bound?"

"Well, I was dropping down a bit to see if the schooner ain't around
yet. She'd ought to be in by now, if nothing ain't runned into her in
the fog."

Helwyse paused a moment, eying Charon sharply. "The schooner
'Resurrection,'" he began, and, seeing he had hit the mark, continued,
"was run into last night on Long Island Sound, and had her bowsprit
carried away. But no serious damage was done, and she'll be in by
night, if the wind holds."

With this he bade the awe-stricken old yarn-spinner farewell, and,
with secret laughter at his bewilderment, turned to the narrow zigzag
path that climbed the bank, passing the birch-stump champion without a
glance of recognition. A few vigorous minutes brought him to the
summit, whence, facing round, he saw the broad river crawl beneath
him; the little boat, with Charon in the stern, drift downwards; and
beyond, the whole rough length of Manhattan Island.

A few days before Thor Helwyse's departure for Europe (some four years
after his wife's death) he had left a certain little boy and girl in
charge of the nurse,--a woman in whose faithfulness he placed the
utmost confidence,--and had crossed from Brooklyn to New Jersey, to
say good by to Brother Hiero. Returning at night he found one of the
children--his son Balder--locked up in the nursery; the nurse and the
little girl had disappeared, nor did Thor again set eyes on either of
them.

Balder, as he grew up, often questioned his father concerning various
events which had happened beyond the reach of his childish memory; and
among other stories, no doubt this of the farewell visit to Uncle
Glyphic had been often told with all the details. By no miracle,
therefore, but simply by an acute mental process, associating together
time, place, and description, was Balder enabled so to dumfounder old
Charon.

Embarking on a phantom quest, his brain full of whimsical visions,
Balder had thus unexpectedly stepped into the path of his legitimate
affair. The accident (for no better reason than that it was such)
inspired him with a superficial cheerfulness. He had landed some
distance below his uncle Glyphic's house,--for such indeed it
was,--and he now took his way towards it through trees and underbrush.
It was so situated, and so thickly surrounded with foliage, as to be
visible from no point in the vicinity. Had the site been chosen with a
view to concealment, the builder could not have succeeded better.
Remembering the eccentricity of his uncle's character, as portrayed in
many an anecdote, Balder would not have been surprised to find him
living under ground, or in a pyramid.

On arriving at the wall whereof the ferryman had told him, he found it
a truly formidable affair, some twelve feet high and built of brick.
To scale it without a ladder was impossible; but Balder, never
doubting that there was a gate somewhere, set out in search of it.

It was tiresome walking over the uneven ground and through obstructing
bushes, branches, and stumps. The tall brick barrier seemed as
interminable as unbroken. How many houses, thought Balder, might have
been built from the material thus wasted! If ever he came into
possession of the place, he resolved to present the brick to his
friend Charon, that he might replace his wooden shanty with something
more durable and convenient, and perhaps build a dock for the schooner
"Resurrection" to lie in. It must have taken a fortune to put up such
a wall; were the enclosure proportionally valuable, it was worth while
crossing the ocean to see it. Still more wall! fully a mile of it
already, and yet further it rambled on through leafy thickets. But no
signs of a gate!

"I believe the Devil really does live here!" exclaimed Balder, in
impatient heat; "and the only way in or out is on a broomstick,--or by
diving under ground, as Charon said!"

Stumbling onwards awhile farther, he suddenly came again upon the
river-bank, having skirted the whole length of the wall. There was
actually no getting in! The castle was impregnable.

Helwyse sat down at the foot of a birch-tree which grew a few yards
from the wall.

"How does my uncle manage about his butcher and baker, I wonder! He
might at least have provided a derrick for victualling his stronghold.
Perhaps he hauls up provisions by ropes over the face of the cliff. No
doubt, Charon knew about it. Shall I go down and look?"

It was provoking--having come so far to call on a relative--to be put
off with a mile or two of brick wall. The gate must have been walled
up since his father's time, for Thor had never mentioned any
deficiency in that respect. But Balder's determination was
piqued,--not to mention his curiosity. Had the path from Mr.
MacGentle's office to Doctor Glyphic's door been straight and
unobstructed, the young man might have wandered aside and never
reached the end. As it was, he was goaded into the resolution to see
his uncle at all hazards. An additional spur was the thought of the
gracious apparition which he had seen--or dreamt he saw--from the
farther bank. Was she indeed but an apparition?--or the single reality
amidst the throng of fantasies evoked by his overwrought
mind?--beaconing him through misty errors to a fate better than he
knew! In all seriousness, who could she be? Had Doctor Glyphic crowned
his eccentricities by marrying, and begetting a daughter?

These speculations were interrupted by the clear, joyous note of a
bird, just above Balder's head. It was such a note as might have been
uttered by a paradisical cuckoo with the breath of a brighter world in
his throat. Looking up, he saw a beautiful little fowl perched on the
topmost twig of the birch-tree. It had a slender bill, and on its head
a crest of splendid feathers, which it set up at Balder in a most
coquettish manner. The next moment it flew over the wall, and from the
farther side warbled an invitation to follow.

Although he could not fly, Balder reflected that he could climb, and
that the top of the tree would show him more than he could see now.
The birch looked tolerably climbable and was amply high; as to
toughness, he thought not about it. Beneath what frivolous disguises
does destiny mask her approach! Discretion is a virtue; yet, had
Balder been discreet enough to examine the tree before getting into
it, the ultimate consequences are incalculable!

As it was (and marvelling why he had not thought of doing it before)
he set stoutly to work, and, despite his jack-boots, was soon among
the upper branches. The birch trembled and groaned unheeded. The bird
(an Egyptian bird,--a hoopoe,--descendant of a pair brought by Doctor
Glyphic from the Nile a quarter of a century ago),--the hoopoe was
fluttering and warbling and setting its brilliant cap at the young man
more captivatingly than ever. A glance over the enclosure showed a
beautifully fertile and luxurious expanse, damasked with soft green
grass and studded with flowers and trees. A few hundred yards away
billowed the white tops of an apple-orchard in full bloom. Southward,
half seen through boughs and leaves, rose an anomalous structure of
brick, glass, and stone, which could only be the famous house on whose
design and decoration old Hiero Glyphic had spent years and fortunes.

The tract was like an oasis in a forbidding land. The soil had none
of the sandy and clayey consistency peculiar to New Jersey, but was
deep and rich as an English valley. The sunshine rested more warmly
and mellowly here than elsewhere. The southern breeze acquired a
tropical flavor in loitering across it. The hoopoe had seemed out of
place on the hither side the wall, but now looked as much at home as
though the Hudson had been the Nile indeed.

"My uncle," said Balder to himself, as he swayed among the branches of
his birch-tree, "has re

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