INTRODUCTORY NOTE. (continued 5)

“One morning, as, lost in a rapture of holy meditation, he prayed his daily prayer, a small bird perched upon his window-sill, and began to sing. Not a loud song, but a sweet song—full of the utmost tenderness and playful warbling,—a song born out of the leaves and grasses and gentle winds of heaven,—as delicate a tune as ever small bird sang. The priest Philemon listened, and his mind wandered. The bird’s singing was sweet; oh, so sweet, that it recalled to him many things he had imagined long ago forgotten,—almost he heard his mother’s voice again,—and the blithe and gracious days of his early youth suggested themselves to his memory like the lovely fragments of a poem once familiar, but now scarce remembered. Presently the bird flew away, and the priest Philemon awoke as from a dream,—his prayer had been interrupted; his thoughts had been drawn down to earth from heaven, all through the twittering of a foolish feathered thing not worth a farthing! Angry with himself, he spent the day in penitence,—and on the following morning betook himself to his devotions with more than his usual ardour. Stretched on his prayer-mat he lay entranced; when suddenly a low sweet trill of sound broke gently through the silence,—the innocent twittering voice of the little bird once more aroused him,—first to a sense of wonder, then of wrath. Starting up impatiently he looked about him, and saw the bird quite close, within his reach,—it had flown inside his hut, and now hopped lightly over the floor towards him, its bright eyes full of fearless confidence, its pretty wings still quivering with the fervour of its song. Then the priest Philemon seized a heavy oaken staff, and slew it where it stood with one remorseless blow, and flung the little heap of ruffled feathers out into the woodland, saying fiercely—

“‘Thou, at least, shalt never more disturb my prayers!’

“And, even as he thus spoke, a great light shone forth suddenly, more dazzling than the brightness of the day, and lo! an Angel stood within the hut, just where the dead bird’s blood had stained the floor. And the priest Philemon fell upon his face and trembled greatly, for the Vision was more glorious than the grandest of his dreams. And a Voice called aloud, saying—

“‘Philemon, why hast thou slain My messenger?’

“And Philemon looked up in fear and wonderment, answering—

“‘Dread Lord, what messenger? I have slain nothing but a bird.’

“And the voice spake again, saying—

“‘O thou remorseless priest!—Knowest thou not that every bird in the forest is Mine,—every leaf on the trees is Mine,—every blade of grass and every flower is Mine, and is a part of Me! The song of that slain bird was sweeter than thy many prayers;—and when thou didst listen to its voice thou wert nearer Heaven than thou hast ever been! Thou hast rebelled against My law;—in rejecting Love, thou hast rejected Me,—and when thou didst turn the poor and needy from thy doors, refusing them all comfort, even so did I turn My Face from thee and refuse thy petitions. Wherefore hear now thy punishment. For the space of a thousand years thou shalt live within this forest;—no human eye shall ever find thee,—no human foot shall ever track thee—no human voice shall ever sound upon thy ears. No companions shalt thou have but birds and beasts and flowers,—from these shalt thou learn wisdom, and through thy love of these alone shalt thou make thy peace with Heaven! Pray no more,—fast no more,—for such things count but little in the eternal reckonings,—but love!—and learn to make thyself beloved, even by the least and lowest, and by this shalt thou penetrate at last the mystery of the Divine!’

“The voice ceased—the glory vanished, and when the priest Philemon raised his eyes he was alone.”

Here, altering by a few delicate modulations the dreamy character of the music he had been improvising, Féraz reverted again to the quaint, simple, and solemn chords with which he had opened the recitation.

“Humbled in spirit, stricken at heart, conscious of the justice of his doom, yet working as one not without hope, Philemon began his heaven-appointed task. And to this day travellers’ legends tell of a vast impenetrable solitude, a forest of giant trees, where never a human step has trod, but where, it is said, strange colonies of birds and beasts do congregate,—where rare and marvellous plants and flowers flourish in their fairest hues,—where golden bees and dazzling butterflies gather by thousands,—where all the songsters of the air make the woods musical,—where birds of passage, outward or homeward bound, rest on their way, sure of a pleasant haven,—and where all the beautiful, wild, and timid inhabitants of field, forest, and mountain are at peace together, mutually content in an Eden of their own. There is a guardian of the place,—so say the country people,—a Spirit, thin and white, and silver-haired, who understands the language of the birds, and knows the secrets of the flowers, and in whom all the creatures of the woods confide—a mystic being whose strange life has lasted nearly a thousand years. Generations have passed—cities and empires have crumbled to decay,—and none remember him who was once called Philemon,—the ‘wise’ priest, grown wise indeed at last, with the only wisdom God ever sanctifies—the Wisdom of Love.”

With a soft impressive chord the music ceased,—the story was ended,—and Féraz rose from the piano to be surrounded at once by a crowd of admirers, all vying with each other in flattering expressions of applause and delight; but, though he received these compliments with unaffected and courteous grace enough, his eyes perpetually wandered to his brother’s face,—that dark, absorbed beloved face,—yes, beloved!—for, rebel as he might against El-Râmi’s inflexible will and despotic power, Féraz knew he could never wrench from out his heart the deep affection and reverence for him which were the natural result of years of tender and sympathetic intercourse. If his brother had commanded him, he had also loved him,—there could be no doubt of that. Was he displeased or unhappy now, that he looked so sad and absorbed in gloomy and perplexed thought? A strange pained emotion stirred Féraz’s sensitive soul,—some intangible vague sense of separation seemed to have arisen between himself and El-Râmi, and he grew impatient with this brilliant assembly of well-dressed chattering folk, whose presence prevented him from giving vent to the full expression of his feelings. Lady Melthorpe talked to him in dulcet languid tones, fanning herself the while, and telling him sweetly what a “wonderful touch” he had,—what an “exquisite speaking voice”—and so forth, all which elegantly turned phrases he heard as in a dream. As soon as he could escape from her and those of her friends who were immediately round him, he made his way to El-Râmi and touched his arm.

“Let me stay beside you!” he said in a low tone in which there was a slight accent of entreaty.

El-Râmi turned, and looked at him kindly.

“Dear boy, you had better make new friends while you can, lest the old be taken from you.”

“Friends!” echoed Féraz—“Friends—here?” He gave a gesture more eloquent than speech, of doubt and disdain,—then continued, “Might we not go now? Is it not time to return home and sleep?”

El-Râmi smiled.

“Nay, are we not seeing life? Here we are among pretty women, well-bred men—the rooms are elegant,—and the conversation is as delightfully vague and nearly as noisy as the chattering of monkeys—yet, with all these advantages, you talk of sleep!”

Féraz laughed a little.

“Yes, I am tired,” he said. “It does not seem to me real, all this—there is something shadowy and unsubstantial about it. I think sleep is better.”

At that moment Irene Vassilius came up to them.

“I am just going,” she said, letting her soft serious eyes dwell on Féraz with interest, “but I feel I must thank you for your story of the ‘Priest Philemon.’ Is it your own idea?—or does such a legend exist?”

“Nothing is really new,” replied Féraz—“but, such as it is, it is my own invention.”

“Then you are a poet and musician at one and the same time,” said Irene. “It seems a natural combination of gifts, yet the two do not always go together. I hope”—she now addressed herself to El-Râmi—“I hope very much you will come and see me, though I’m afraid I’m not a very popular person. My friends are few, so I cannot promise you much entertainment. Indeed, as a rule, people do not like me.”

“I like you!” said Féraz, quickly and impulsively.

She smiled.

“Yes? That is good of you. And I believe you, for you are too unworldly to deal in flatteries. But I assure you that, generally speaking, literary women are never social favourites.”

“Not even when they are lovely like you?” questioned Féraz, with simple frankness.

She coloured at the evident sincerity of his admiration and the boyish openness with which it was thus expressed. Then she laughed a little.

“Loveliness is not acknowledged as at all existent in literary females,” she replied lightly, yet with a touch of scorn,—“even if they do possess any personal charm, it only serves as a peg for the malicious to hang a slander on. And, of the two sexes, men are most cruel to a woman who dares to think for herself.”

“Are you sure of that, Madame?” asked El-Râmi gently. “May not this be an error of your judgment?”

“I would that it were!” she said with intense expression—“Heaven knows how sincerely I should rejoice to be proved wrong! But I am not wrong. Men always judge women as their inferiors, not only physically (which they are) but mentally (which they are not), and always deny them an independent soul and independent emotions,—the majority of men, indeed, treat them pretty much as a sort of superior cattle;—but, nevertheless, there is a something in what the French call ‘L’Éternel Féminin.’ Women are distinctly the greatest sufferers in all suffering creation,—and I have often thought that for so much pain and so much misjudgment, endured often with such heroic silence and uncomplaining fortitude, the compensation will be sweeter and more glorious than we, half drowned in our own tears, can as yet hope for, or imagine!”

She paused—her eyes were dark with thought and full of a dreamy sorrow,—then, smiling gently, she held out her hand.

“I talk too much, you will say—women always do! Come and see me if you feel disposed—not otherwise; I will send you my card through Lady Melthorpe—meantime, good-night!”

El-Râmi took her hand, and, as he pressed it in his own, felt again that curious thrill which had before communicated itself to his nerves through the same contact.

“Surely you must be a visionary, Madame!” he said, abruptly and with a vague sense of surprise—“and you see things not at all of this world!”

Her faint roseate colour deepened, giving singular beauty to her face.

“What a tell-tale hand mine is!” she replied, withdrawing it slowly from his clasp. “Yes—you are right,—if I could not see things higher than this world, I could not endure my existence for an hour. It is because I feel the future so close about me that I have courage for, and indifference to, the present.”

With that, she left them, and both El-Râmi and Féraz followed her graceful movements with interested eyes, as she glided through the rooms in her snowy trailing robes, with the frosty flash of diamonds in her hair, till she had altogether disappeared; then the languid voice of Lady Melthorpe addressed them.

“Isn’t she an odd creature, that Irene Vassilius? So quaint and peculiar in her ideas! People detest her, you know—she is so dreadfully clever!”

“There could not be a better reason for hatred!” said El-Râmi.

“You see, she says such unpleasant things,” went on Lady Melthorpe, complacently fanning herself,—“she has such decided opinions, and will not accommodate herself to people’s ways. I must confess I always find her de trop myself.”

“She was your guest to-night,” said Féraz suddenly, and with such a sternness in his accent as caused her ladyship to look at him in blank surprise.

“Certainly! One must always ask a celebrity.”

“If one must always ask, then one is bound always to respect,” said Féraz coldly. “In our code d’honneur, we never speak ill of those who have partaken of our hospitality.”

So saying, he turned on his heel and walked away with so much haughtiness of demeanour that Lady Melthorpe stood as though rooted to the spot, staring speechlessly after him. Then rousing herself, she looked at El-Râmi and shrugged her shoulders.

“Really,” she began,—“really, Mr. El-Râmi, your brother’s manner is very strange——”

“It is,” returned El-Râmi quickly—“I admit it. His behaviour is altogether unpolished—and he is quite unaccustomed to society. I told Lord Melthorpe so,—and I was against his being invited here. He says exactly what he thinks, without fear or favour, and in this regard is really a mere barbarian. Allow me to apologise for him!”

Lady Melthorpe bowed stiffly,—she saw, or fancied she saw, a faint ironical smile playing on El-Râmi’s lips beneath his dark moustache. She was much annoyed,—the idea of a “boy,” like Féraz, presuming to talk to her, a leader of London fashion, about a code d’honneur! The thing was monstrous,—absurd! And as for Irene Vassilius, why should not she be talked about?—she was a public person; a writer of books which Mrs. Grundy in her church-going moods had voted as “dangerous.” Truly Lady Melthorpe considered she had just cause to be ruffled, and she began to regret having invited these “Eastern men,” as she termed them, to her house at all. El-Râmi perceived her irritation, but he made no further remark; and, as soon as he could conveniently do so, he took his formal leave of her. Quickly threading his way through the now rapidly thinning throng, he sought out Féraz, whom he found in the hall talking to Roy Ainsworth and making final arrangements for the sitting he was to give the artist next day.

“I should like to make a study of your head too,” said Roy, with a keen glance at El-Râmi as he approached—“but I suppose you have no time.”

“No time—and still less inclination!” responded El-Râmi laughingly; “for I have sworn that no ‘counterfeit presentment’ of my bodily form shall ever exist. It would always be a false picture—it would never be me, because it would only represent the perishable, whilst I am the imperishable.”

“Singular man!” said Roy Ainsworth. “What do you mean?”

“What should I mean,” replied El-Râmi quickly, “save what all your religions and churches mean, if in truth they have any meaning. Is there not something else besides this fleshly covering? If you can paint the imagined Soul of a man looking out of his eyes, you are a great artist,—but if you could paint the Soul itself, stripped of its mortal disguise, radiant, ethereal, brilliant as lightning, beautiful as dawn, you would be greater still. And the soul is the Me,—these features of mine, this Appearance, is mere covering,—we want a Portrait, not a Costume.”

“Your argument applies to your brother as well as yourself,” said Ainsworth, wondering at the eloquent wildness of this strange El-Râmi’s language, and fascinated by it in spite of himself.

“Just so! Only the earth-garment of Féraz is charming and becoming—mine is not. It is a case of ‘my hair is white but not with years’—the ‘Prisoner of Chillon’ sort of thing. Good-night!”

“Good-night!” and the artist shook hands warmly with both brothers, saying to Féraz as he parted from him—“I may expect you then to-morrow? You will not fail?”

“You may rely upon me!” and Féraz nodded lightly in adieu, and followed El-Râmi out of the house into the street, where they began to walk homeward together at a rapid rate. As they went, by some mutual involuntary instinct they lifted their eyes to the dense blue heavens, where multitudes of stars were brilliantly visible. Féraz drew a long deep breath.

“There,” he said, “is the Infinite and Real,—what we have seen of life to-night is finite and unreal.”

El-Râmi made no reply.

“Do you not think so?” persisted Féraz earnestly.

“I cannot say definitely what is Real and what is Unreal,” said El-Râmi slowly—“both are so near akin. Féraz, are you aware you offended Lady Melthorpe to-night?”

“Why should she be offended? I only said just what I thought.”

“Good heavens, my dear boy, if you always go about saying just what you think, you will find the world too hot to hold you. To say the least of it, you will never be fit for society.”

“I don’t want to be fit for it,” said Féraz disdainfully, “if Lady Melthorpe’s ‘at home’ is a picture of it. I want to forget it,—the most of it, I mean. I shall remember Madame Vassilius because she is sympathetic and interesting. But for the rest!—my dearest brother, I am far happier with you.”

El-Râmi took his arm gently.

“Yet you leave me to-morrow to gratify an artist’s whim!” he said. “Have you thought of that?”

“Oh, but that is nothing—only an hour or two’s sitting. He was so very anxious that I could not refuse. Does it displease you?”

“My dear Féraz, I am displeased at nothing. You complained of my authority over you once—and I have determined you shall not complain again. Consider yourself free.”

“I do not want my liberty,” said Féraz almost petulantly.

“Try it!” responded El-Râmi with a smile and half a sigh. “Liberty is sweet,—but, like other things, it brings its own responsibilities.”

They walked on till they had almost reached their own door.

“Your story of the priest Philemon was very quaint and pretty,” said El-Râmi then abruptly. “You meant it as a sort of allegory for me, did you not?”

Féraz looked wistfully at him, but hesitated to reply.

“It does not quite fit me,” went on El-Râmi gently. “I am not impervious to love—for I love you. Perhaps the angels will take that fact into consideration when they are settling my thousand or million years’ punishment.”

There was a touch of quiet pathos in his voice which moved Féraz greatly, and he could not trust himself to speak. When they entered their own abode, El-Râmi said the usual “Good-night” in his usual kindly manner,—but Féraz reverently stooped and kissed the hand extended to him,—the potent hand that had enriched his life with poesy and dowered it with dreams.

XXVI.

All the next day El-Râmi was alone. Féraz went out early to fulfil the appointment made with Roy Ainsworth; no visitors called,—and not even old Zaroba came near the study, where, shut up with his books and papers, her master worked assiduously hour after hour, writing as rapidly as hand and pen would allow, and satisfying his appetite solely with a few biscuits dipped in wine. Just as the shadows of evening were beginning to fall, his long solitude was disturbed by the sharp knock of a telegraph-messenger, who handed him a missive which ran briefly thus—

“Your brother stays to dine with me.—Ainsworth.”

El-Râmi crushed the paper in his hand, then, flinging it aside, stood for a moment, lost in meditation, with a sorrowful expression in his dark eyes.

“Ay me! the emptiness of the world!” he murmured at last—“I shall be left alone, I suppose, as my betters are left, according to the rule of this curiously designed and singularly unsatisfactory system of human life. What do the young care for the solitude of their elders who have tended and loved them? New thoughts, new scenes, new aspirations beckon them, and off they go like birds on the wing,—never to return to the old nest or the old ways. I despise the majority of women myself,—and yet I pity from my soul all those who are mothers,—the miserable dignity and pathos of maternity are, in my opinion, grotesquely painful. To think of the anguish the poor delicate wretches endure in bringing children at all into the world,—then, the tenderness and watchful devotion expended on their early years,—and then—why then, these same children grow up for the most part into indifferent (when not entirely callous) men and women, who make their own lives as it seems best to themselves, and almost forget to whom they owe their very existence. It is hard—bitterly hard. There ought to be some reason for such a wild waste of love and affliction. At present, however, I can see none.”

He sighed deeply, and stared moodily into the deepening shadows.

“Loneliness is horrible!” he said aloud, as though addressing some invisible auditor. “It is the chief terror of death,—for one must always die alone. No matter how many friends and relatives stand weeping round the bed, one is absolutely alone at the hour of death, for the stunned soul wanders blindly

“out of sight,

Far off in a place where it is not heard.”

That solitary pause and shudder on the brink of the Unseen is fearful,—it unnerves us all to think of it. If Love could help us,—but even Love grows faint and feeble then.”

As he mused thus, a strange vague longing came over him,—an impulse arising out of he knew not what suggestion; and, acting on his thought, he went suddenly and swiftly upstairs, and straight into the chamber of Lilith. Zaroba was there, and rose from her accustomed corner silently, and moved with a somewhat feeble step into the ante-room while El-Râmi bent over the sleeping girl. Lovelier than ever she seemed that evening,—and, as he stooped above her, she stretched out her fair white arms and smiled. His heart beat quickly,—he had, for the moment, ceased to analyse his own feelings,—and he permitted himself to gaze upon her beauty and absorb it, without, as usual, taking any thought of the scientific aspect of her condition.

“Tresses twisted by fairy fingers,

In which the light of the morning lingers!”

he murmured, as he touched a rippling strand of the lovely hair that lay spread like a fleece of gold floss silk on the pillow near him,—“Poor Lilith!—Sweet Lilith!”

As if responsive to his words, she turned slightly towards him, and felt the air blindly with one wandering white hand. Gently he caught it and imprisoned it within his own,—then, on a strange impulse, kissed it. To his utter amazement she answered that touch as though it had been a call.

“I am here, ... my Belovëd!”

He started, and an icy thrill ran through his veins;—that word “Belovëd” was a sort of electric shock to his system, and sent a dizzying rush of blood to his brain. What did she mean,—what could she mean? The last time she had addressed him she had declared that he was not even her friend—now she called him her “beloved”—as much to his amazement as his fear. Presently, however, he considered that here perhaps was some new development of his experiment;—the soul of Lilith might possibly be in closer communion with him than he had yet imagined. But, in spite of his attempt to reason away his emotions, he was nervous, and stood by the couch silently, afraid to speak, and equally afraid to move. Lilith was silent too. A long pause ensued, in which the usually subdued tickings of the clock seemed to become painfully audible. El-Râmi’s breath came and went quickly,—he was singularly excited,—some subtle warmth from the little hand he held permeated his veins, and a sense of such utter powerlessness possessed him as he had never experienced before. What ailed him? He could not tell. Where was the iron force of his despotic will? He seemed unable to exert it,—unable even to think coherently while Lilith’s hand thus rested in his. Had she grown stronger than himself? A tingling tremor ran through him, as the strange words of the monk’s written warning suddenly recurred to his memory.

“Beware the end! With Lilith’s love comes Lilith’s freedom.”

But Lilith smiled with placid sweetness, and still left her hand confidingly in his; he held that hand, so warm and soft and white, and was loath to let it go,—he studied the rapt expression of the beautiful face, the lovely curve of the sweet shut lips, the delicately-veined lids of the closed eyes,—and was dimly conscious of a sense of vague happiness curiously intermingled with terror. By and by he began to collect his ideas which had been so suddenly scattered by the one word “Belovëd,”—and he resolved to break the mystic silence that oppressed and daunted him.

“Dreaming or waking, is she?” he queried aloud, a little tremulously, and as though he were talking to himself. “She must be dreaming!”

“Dreaming of joy!” said Lilith softly, and with quick responsiveness—“only that Joy is no dream! I hear your voice,—I am conscious of your touch,—almost I see you! The cloud hangs there between us still—but God is good,—He will remove that cloud.”

El-Râmi listened, perplexed and wondering.

“Lilith,” he said in a voice that strove in vain to assume its wonted firmness and authority—“What say you of clouds,—you who are in the full radiance of a light that is quenchless? Have you not told me of a glory that out-dazzles the sun, in which you move and have your being,—then what do you know of Shadow?”

“Yours is the Shadow,” replied Lilith—“not mine! I would that I could lift it from your eyes, that you might see the wonder and the beauty. Oh, cruel Shadow, that lies between my love and me!”

“Lilith! Lilith!” exclaimed El-Râmi in strange agitation, “Why will you talk of love!”

“Do you not think of love?” said Lilith—“and must I not respond to your innermost thought?”

“Not always do you so respond, Lilith!” said El-Râmi quickly, recovering himself a little, and glad of an opportunity to bring back his mind to a more scientific level. “Often you speak of things I know not,—things that perhaps I shall never know——”

“Nay, you must know,” said Lilith, with soft persistence. “Every unit of life in every planet is bound to know its Cause and Final Intention. All is clear to me, and will be so to you, hereafter. You ask me of these things—I tell you,—but you do not believe me;—you will never believe me till—the end.”

“Beware the end!” The words echoed themselves so distinctly in El-Râmi’s mind that he could almost have fancied they were spoken aloud in the room. “What end?” he asked eagerly.

But to this Lilith answered nothing.

He looked at the small sensitive hand he held, and, stroking it gently, was about to lay it back on her bosom, when all at once she pressed her fingers closely over his palm, and sat upright, her delicate face expressive of the most intense emotion, notwithstanding her closed eyes.

“Write!” she said in a clear penetrating voice that sent silvery echoes through the room—“write these truths to the world you live in. Tell the people they all work for Evil, and therefore Evil shall be upon them. What they sow, even that shall they reap,—with the measure they have used, it shall be measured to them again. O wild world!—sad world!—world wherein the pride of wealth, the joy of sin, the cruelty of avarice, the curse of selfishness, outweigh all pity, all sympathy, all love! For this God’s law of Compensation makes but one return—Destruction. Wars shall prevail; plague and famine shall ravage the nations;—young children shall murder the parents who bore them; theft and rapine shall devastate the land. For your world is striving to live without God,—and a world without God is a disease that must die. Like a burnt-out star this Earth shall fall from its sphere and vanish utterly—and its sister-planets shall know it no more. For when it is born again, it will be new.”

The words came from her lips with a sort of fervid eloquence which seemed to exhaust her, for she grew paler and paler, and her head began to sink backward on the pillow. El-Râmi gently put his arm round her to support her, and, as he did so, a kind of supernatural light irradiated her features.

“Believe me, O my belovëd, believe the words of Lilith!” she murmured. “There is but one law leading to all Wisdom. Evil generates Evil, and contains within itself its own retribution. Good generates Good, and holds within itself the germ of eternal reproduction. Love begets Love, and from Love is born Immortality!”

Her voice grew fainter,—she sank entirely back on her pillow; yet once again her lips moved and the word “Immortality!” floated whisperingly like a sigh. El-Râmi drew his arm away from her, and at the same instant disengaged his hand from her clasp. She seemed bewildered at this, and for a minute or two felt in the air as though searching for some missing treasure,—then her arms fell passively on each side of her, seemingly inert and lifeless. El-Râmi bent over her half curiously, half anxiously,—his eyes dwelt on the ruby-like jewel that heaved gently up and down on her softly rounded bosom,—he watched the red play of light around it, and on the white satiny skin beneath,—and then,—all at once his sight grew dazzled and his brain began to swim. How lovely she was!—how much more than lovely! And how utterly she was his!—his, body and soul, and in his power! He was startled at the tenor of his own unbidden thoughts,—whence, in God’s name, came these new impulses, these wild desires that fired his blood? ... Furious with himself for what he deemed the weakness of his own emotions, he strove to regain the mastery over his nerves,—to settle his mind once more in its usual attitude of cold inflexibility and indifferent composure,—but all in vain. Some subtle chord in his mental composition had been touched mysteriously, he knew not how, and had set all the other chords a-quivering,—and he felt himself all suddenly to be as subdued and powerless as when his mysterious visitor, the monk from Cyprus, had summoned up (to daunt him, as he thought) the strange vision of an Angel in his room.

Again he looked at Lilith;—again he resisted the temptation that assailed him to clasp her in his arms, to shower a lover’s kisses on her lips, and thus waken her to the full bitter-sweet consciousness of earthly life,—till in the sharp extremity of his struggle, and loathing himself for his own folly, he suddenly dropped on his knees by the side of the couch and gazed with a vague wild entreaty at the tranquil loveliness that lay there so royally enshrined.

“Have mercy, Lilith!” he prayed half aloud, and scarcely conscious of his words. “If you are stronger in your weakness than I in my strength, have mercy! Repel me,—distrust me, disobey me—but do not love me! Make me not as one of the foolish for whom a woman’s smile, a woman’s touch, are more than life, and more than wisdom. O let me not waste the labour of my days on a freak of passion!—let me not lose everything I have gained by long study and research, for the mere wild joy of an hour! Lilith, Lilith! Child, woman, angel!—whatever you are, have pity upon me! I dare not love you! ... I dare not!”

So murmuring incoherently, he rose, and, walking dizzily like a man abruptly startled from deep sleep, he went straight out of the room, never looking back once, else he might have seen how divinely, how victoriously Lilith smiled!

XXVII.

Reaching his study, he shut himself in and locked the door,—and, then sitting down, buried his head in his hands and fell to thinking. Such odd thoughts too!—they came unbidden, and chased one another in and out of his brain like will-o’-the-wisps in a wilderness. It was growing late, and Féraz had not yet returned,—but he heeded not the hour, or his brother’s continued absence,—he was occupied in such a mental battle with his own inward forces as made him utterly indifferent to external things. The question he chiefly asked himself was this:—Of what use was all the science he had discovered and mastered, if he was not exempt,—utterly exempt from the emotions common to the most ignorant of men? His pride had been that he was “above” human nature,—that he was able to look down upon its trivial joys and sorrows with a supreme and satiric scorn,—that he knew its ways so well as to be able to calculate its various hesitating moves in all directions, social and political, with very nearly exact accuracy. Why then was he shaken to the very centre of his being to-night, by the haunting vision of an angelic face and the echo of a sweet faint voice softly breathing the words—“My belovëd!” He could dominate others; why could he not dominate himself?

“This will never do!” he said aloud at last, starting up from his brooding attitude—“I must read—I must work,—I must, at all costs, get out of this absurd frame of mind into which I have unwittingly fallen. Besides, how often have I not assured myself that for all practical earthly considerations Lilith is dead—positively dead!”

And to reinstate himself in this idea he unlocked his desk and took from it a small parchment volume in which he had carefully chronicled the whole account of his experiment on Lilith from the beginning. One page was written in the form of a journal—the opposite leaf being reserved for “queries,” and the book bore the curious superscription “In Search of the Soul of Lilith” on its cover. The statement began at once without preamble, thus:

“August 8, 18—. 9 P.M.—Lilith, an Arab girl, aged twelve, dies in my arms. Cause of death, fever and inanition. Heart ceased to beat at ten minutes past eight this evening. While the blood is still warm in the corpse I inject the ‘Electro-flamma’ under the veins, close beneath the heart. No immediate effect visible.

“11 P.M.—Arab women lay out Lilith’s corpse for burial. Questioned the people as to her origin. An orphan child, of poor parentage, no education, and unquiet disposition. Not instructed in religious matters, but following the religious customs of others by instinct and imitation. Distinctive features of the girl when in health—restlessness, temper, animalism, and dislike of restraint. Troublesome to manage, and not a thinking child by any means.

“August 9. 5 A.M.—The caravan has just started on its way, leaving the corpse of Lilith with me. The woman Zaroba remains behind. Féraz I sent away last night in haste. I tell Zaroba part of my intention; she is superstitious and afraid of me, but willing to serve me. Lilith remains inanimate. I again use the ‘Electro-flamma,’ this time close to all the chief arteries. No sign of life.

“August 10. Noon.—I begin rather to despair. As a last resource I have injected carefully a few drops of ‘Flamma’ close to the brain; it is the mainspring of the whole machine, and if it can be set in motion——

“Midnight.—Victory! The brain has commenced to pulsate feebly, and the heart with it. Breathing has begun, but slowly and with difficulty. A faint colour has come into the hitherto waxen face. Success is possible now.

“August 15.—During these last five days Lilith has breathed, and, to a certain extent, lived. She does not open her eyes, nor move a muscle of her body, and at times still appears dead. She is kept alive (if it is life) by the vital fluid, and by that only. I must give her more time.

“August 20.—I have called her by name, and she has answered—but how strangely! Where does she learn the things she speaks of? She sees the Earth, she tells me, like a round ball circling redly in a cloud of vapours, and she hears music everywhere, and perceives a ‘light beyond.’ Where and how does she perceive anything?”

Here on the opposite side of the page was written the “query,” which in this case was headed

“Problem.”

“Given, a child’s brain, not wholly developed in its intellectual capacity, with no impressions save those which are purely material, and place that brain in a state of perpetual trance, how does it come to imagine or comprehend things which science cannot prove? Is it the Soul which conveys these impressions, and, if so, what is the Soul, and where is it?”

El-Râmi read the passage over and over again, then, sighing impatiently, closed the book and put it by.

“Since I wrote that, what has she not said—what has she not told me!” he muttered; “and the ‘child’s brain’ is a child’s brain no longer, but a woman’s, while she has obtained absolutely no knowledge of any sort by external means. Yet she—she who was described by those who knew her in her former life as ‘not a thinking child, troublesome and difficult to manage,’ she it is who describes to me the scenery and civilisation of Mars, the inhabitants of Sirius, the wonders of a myriad of worlds; she it is who talks of the ravishing beauty of things Divine and immortal, of the glory of the heavens, of the destined fate of the world. God knows it is very strange!—and the problem I wrote out six years ago is hardly nearer solving than it was then. If I could believe—but then I cannot—I must always doubt, and shall not doubt lead to discovery?”

Thus arguing with himself, and scoffing interiorly at the suggestion which just then came unbidden to his mind—“Blessed are they which have not seen and yet believed”—he turned over some more papers and sorted them, with the intention and hope of detaching his thoughts entirely from what had suddenly become the too-enthralling subject of Lilith’s beauteous personality. Presently he came upon a memorandum, over which he nodded and smiled with a sort of grim satirical content, entitled, “The Passions of the Human Animal as Nature made Him;” it was only a scrap—a hint of some idea which he had intended to make use of in literary work, but he read it over now with a good deal of curious satisfaction. It ran thus:

“Man, as a purely natural creature, fairly educated, but wholly unspiritualised, is a mental composition of: Hunger, Curiosity, Self-Esteem, Avarice, Cowardice, Lust, Cruelty, Personal Ambition; and on these vile qualities alone our ‘society’ hangs together; the virtues have no place anywhere, and do not count at all, save as conveniently pious metaphors.”

“It is true!” he said aloud—“as true as the very light of the skies! Now am I, or have I ever been, guilty of these common vices of ordinary nature? No, no; I have examined my own conscience too often and too carefully. I have been accused of personal ambition, but even that is a false accusation, for I do not seek vulgar rewards, or the noise of notoriety ringing about my name. All that I am seeking to discover is meant for the benefit of the world; that Humanity,—poor, wretched, vicious Humanity—may know positively and finally that there is a Future. For till they do know it, beyond all manner of doubt, why should they strive to be better? Why should they seek to quell their animalism? Why should they need to be any better than they are? And why, above all things, should they be exhorted by their preachers and teachers to fasten their faith to a Myth, and anchor their hopes on a Dream?”

At that moment a loud and prolonged rat-tat-tatting at the street door startled him,—he hastily thrust all his loose manuscripts into a drawer, and went to answer the summons, glancing at the clock as he passed it with an air of complete bewilderment,—for it was close upon two A.M., and he could not imagine how the time had flown. He had scarcely set foot across the hall before another furious knocking began, and he stopped abruptly to listen to the imperative clatter with a curious wondering expression on his dark handsome face. When the noise ceased again, he began slowly to undo the door.

“Patience, my dear boy,” he said as he flung it open—“is a virtue, as you must have seen it set forth in copy-books. I provided you with a latch-key—where is it?—there could not be a more timely hour for its usage.”

But while he spoke, Féraz, for it was he, had sprung in swiftly like some wild animal pursued by hunters, and he now stood in the hall, nearly breathless, staring confusedly at his brother with big, feverishly-bright bewildered eyes.

“Then I have escaped!” he said in a half-whisper—“I am at home,—really at home again!”

El-Râmi looked at him steadily,—then, turning away quietly, carefully shut and bolted the door.

“Have you spent a happy day, Féraz?” he gently inquired.

“Happy!” echoed Féraz—“Happy? Yes. No! Good God!—what do you mean by happiness?”

El-Râmi looked at him again, and, making no reply to this adjuration, simply turned about and went into his study. Féraz followed.

“I know what you think,” he said in pained accents—“You think I’ve been drinking—so I have. But I’m not drunk, for all that. They gave me wine—bad burgundy—detestable champagne—the sun never shone on the grapes that made it,—and I took very little of it. It is not that which has filled me with a terror too real to deserve your scorn,—it is not that which has driven me home here to you for help and shelter——”

“It is somewhat late to be ‘driven’ home,” remarked El-Râmi with a slightly sarcastic smile—“Two in the morning, and—bad champagne or good,—you are talking, my dear Féraz, to say the least of it, rather wildly.”

“For God’s sake do not sneer at me!” cried Féraz passionately—“I shall go mad if you do! Is it as late as you say?—I never knew it. I fled from them at midnight;—I have wandered about alone under the stars since then.”

At these words, El-Râmi’s expression changed from satire to compassion. His fine eyes softened, and their lustrous light grew deeper and more tender.

“Alone—and under the stars?” he repeated softly—“Are not the two things incompatible—to you? Have you not made the stars your companions—almost your friends?”

“No, no!” said Féraz, with a swift gesture of utter hopelessness. “Not now—not now! for all is changed. I see life as it is—hideous, foul, corruptible, cruel! and the once bright planets look pitiless; the heavens I thought so gloriously designed are but an impenetrable vault arched over an ever-filling grave. There is no light, no hope anywhere; how can there be in the face of so much sin? El-Râmi, why did you not tell me? why did you not warn me of the accursed evil of this pulsating movement men call Life? For it seems I have not lived, I have only dreamed!”

And with a heavy sigh, that seemed wrung from his very heart, he threw himself wearily into a chair, and buried his head between his hands in an attitude of utter dejection.

El-Râmi looked at him as he sat thus, with a certain shadow of melancholy on his own fine features, then he spoke gently:

“Who told you, Féraz, that you have not lived?” he asked.

“Zaroba did, first of all,” returned Féraz reluctantly; “and now he, the artist Ainsworth, says the same thing. It seems that to men of the world I look a fool. I know nothing; I am as ignorant as a barbarian——”

“Of what?” queried his brother. “Of wine, loose women, the race-course and the gaming-table? Yes, I grant you, you are ignorant of these, and you may thank God for your ignorance. And these wise ‘men of the world’ who are so superior to you—in what does their wisdom consist?”

Féraz sat silent, wrapt in meditation. Presently he looked up; his lashes were wet, and his lips trembled.

“I wish,” he murmured, “I wish I had never gone there,—I wish I had been content to stay with you.”

El-Râmi laughed a little, but it was to hide a very different emotion.

“My dear fellow,” he said lightly, “I am not an old woman that I should wish you to be tied to my apron-strings. Come, make a clean breast of it; if not the champagne, what is it that has so seriously disagreed with you?”

“Everything!” replied Féraz emphatically. “The whole day has been one of discord—what wonder then that I myself am out of tune! When I first started off from the house this morning, I was full of curious anticipation—I looked upon this invitation to an artist’s studio as a sort of break in what I chose to call the even monotony of my existence,—I fancied I should imbibe new ideas, and be able to understand something of the artistic world of London if I spent the day with a man truly distinguished in his profession. When I arrived at the studio, Mr. Ainsworth was already at work—he was painting—a woman.”

“Well?” said El-Râmi, seeing that Féraz paused, and stammered hesitatingly.

“She was nude,—this woman,” he went on in a low shamed voice, a hot flush creeping over his delicate boyish face,—“A creature without any modesty or self-respect. A model, Mr. Ainsworth called her,—and it seems that she took his money for showing herself thus. Her body was beautiful; like a statue flushed with life,—but she was a devil, El-Râmi!—the foulness of her spirit was reflected in her bold eyes—the coarseness of her mind found echo in her voice,—and I—I sickened at the sight of her; I had never believed in the existence of fiends,—but she was one!”

El-Râmi was silent, and Féraz resumed—

“As I tell you, Ainsworth was painting her, and he asked me to sit beside him and watch his work. His request surprised me,—I said to him in a whisper, ‘Surely she will resent the presence of a stranger?’ He stared at me. ‘She? Whom do you mean?’ he inquired. ‘The woman there,’ I answered. He burst out laughing, called me ‘an innocent,’ and said she was perfectly accustomed to ‘pose’ before twenty men at a time, so that I need have no scruples on that score. So I sat down as he bade me, and watched in silence, and thought——”

“Ah, what did you think?” asked El-Râmi.

“I thought evil things,” answered Féraz deliberately. “And, while thinking them, I knew they were evil. And I put my own nature under a sort of analysis, and came to the conclusion that, when a man does wrong, he is perfectly aware that it is wrong, and that, therefore, doing wrong deliberately and consciously, he has no right to seek forgiveness, either through Christ or any other intermediary. He should be willing to bear the brunt of it, and his prayers should be for punishment, not for pardon.”

“A severe doctrine,” observed El-Râmi. “Strangely so, for a young man who has not ‘lived,’ but only ‘dreamed.’”

“In my dreams I see nothing evil,” said Féraz, “and I think nothing evil. All is harmonious; all works in sweet accordance with a Divine and Infinite plan, of whose ultimate perfection I am sure. I would rather dream so, than live as I have lived to-day.”

El-Râmi forbore to press him with any questions, and, after a little pause, he went on:

“When that woman—the model—went away from the studio, I was as thankful as one might be for the removal of a plague. She dropped a curtain over her bare limbs and disappeared like some vanishing evil spirit. Then Ainsworth asked me to sit to him. I obeyed willingly. He placed me in a half-sitting, half-recumbent attitude, and began to sketch. Suddenly, after about half an hour, it occurred to me that he perhaps wanted to put me in the same picture with that fiend who had gone, and I asked him the question point-blank. ‘Why, certainly!’ he said. ‘You will appear as the infatuated lover of that lady, in my great Academy work.’ Then, El-Râmi, some suppressed rage in me broke loose. I sprang up and confronted him angrily. ‘Never!’ I cried. ‘You shall never picture me thus! If you dared to do it, I would rip your canvas to shreds on the very walls of the Academy itself! I am no “model,” to sell my personality to you for gold!’ He laughed in that lazy, unmirthful way of his. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you are certainly not a model, you are a tiger—a young tiger—quite furious and untamed. I wish you would go and rip up my picture on the Academy walls, as you say; it would make my fortune; I should have so many orders for duplicates. My dear fellow, if you won’t let me put you into my canvas, you are no use to me. I want your meditative face for the face of a poet destroyed by a passion for Phryne. I really think you might oblige me.’ ‘Never!’ I said; ‘the thing would be a libel and a lie. My face is not the face you want. You want a weak face, a round foolish brow, and a receding chin. Why, as God made me, and as I am, every one of my features would falsify your picture’s story! The man who voluntarily sacrifices his genius and his hopes of heaven to vulgar vice and passion must have weakness in him somewhere, and as a true artist you are bound to show that weakness in the features you portray.’ ‘And have you no weakness, you young savage?’ he asked. ‘Not that weakness!’ I said. ‘The wretched incapacity of will that brings the whole soul down to a grovelling depth of materialism—that is not in me!’ I spoke angrily, El-Râmi, perhaps violently; but I could not help myself. He stared at me curiously, and began drawing lines on his palette with his brush dipped in colour. ‘You are a very singular young fellow,’ he said at last. ‘But I must tell you that it was the fair Irene Vassilius who suggested to me that your face would be suitable for that of the poet in my picture. I wanted to please her——’ ‘You will please her more by telling her what I say,’ I interrupted him abruptly. ‘Tell her——’ ‘That you are a new Parsifal,’ he said mockingly. ‘Ah, she will never believe it! All men in her opinion are either brutes or cowards.’ Then he took up a fresh square of canvas, and added: ‘Well, I promise you I will not put you in my picture, as you have such a rooted objection to figuring in public as a slave of Phryne, though, I assure you, most young fellows would be proud of such a distinction; for one is hardly considered a “man” nowadays unless one professes to be “in love”—God save the mark!—with some female beast of the stage or the music-hall. Such is life, my boy! There! now sit still with that look of supreme scorn on your countenance, and that will do excellently.’ ‘On your word of honour, you will not place me in your picture?’ I said. ‘On my word of honour,’ he replied. So, of course, I could not doubt him. And he drew my features on his canvas quickly, and with much more than ordinary skill; and, when he had finished his sketch, he took me out to lunch with him at a noisy, crowded place, called the ‘Criterion.’ There were numbers of men and women there, eating and drinking, all of a low type, I thought, and some of them of a most vulgar and insolent bearing, more like dressed-up monkeys than human beings, I told Ainsworth; but he laughed, and said they were very fair specimens of civilised society. Then, after lunch, we went to a club, where several men were smoking and throwing cards about. They asked me to play, and I told them I knew nothing of the game. Whereupon they explained it; and I said it seemed to me to be quite an imbecile method of losing money. Then they laughed uproariously. One said I was ‘very fresh,’ whatever that might mean. Another asked Ainsworth what he had brought me there for, and Ainsworth answered: ‘To show you one of the greatest wonders of the century—a really young man in his youth,’ and then they laughed again. Later on he took me into the Park. There I saw Madame Vassilius in her carriage. She looked fair and cold, and proud and weary all at once. Her horses came to a standstill under the trees, and Ainsworth went up and spoke to her. She looked at me very earnestly as she gave me her hand, and only said one thing: ‘What a pity you are not with your brother!’ I longed to ask her why, but she seemed unwilling to converse, and soon gave the signal to her coachman to drive on—in fact, she went at once out of the Park. Then Ainsworth got angry and sullen, and said: ‘I hate intellectual women! That pretty scribbler has made so much money that she is perfectly independent of man’s help—and, being independent, she is insolent.’ I was surprised at his tone. I said I could not see where he perceived the insolence. ‘Can you not?’ he asked. ‘She studies men instead of loving them; that is where she is insolent—and—insufferable!’ He was so irritated that I did not pursue the subject, and he then pressed me to stay and dine with him. I accepted—and I am sorry I did.”

“Why?” asked El-Râmi in purposely indifferent tones. “At present, so far as you have told me, your day seems to have passed in a very harmless manner. A peep at a model, a lunch at the Criterion, a glance at a gaming-club, a stroll in the Park—what could be more ordinary? There is no tragedy in it, such as you seem inclined to imagine; it is all the merest bathos.”

Féraz looked up indignantly, his eyes sparkling.

“Is there nothing tragic in the horrible, stifling, strangling consciousness of evil surrounding one like a plague?” he demanded passionately. “To know and to feel that God is far off, instead of near; that one is shut up in a prison of one’s own making, where sweet air and pure light cannot penetrate; to be perfectly conscious that one is moving and speaking with difficulty and agitation in a thick, choking atmosphere of lies—lies—all lies! Is that not tragic? Is that all bathos?”

“My dear fellow, it is life!” said El-Râmi sedately. “It is what you wanted to see, to know, and to understand.”

“It is not life!” declared Féraz hotly. “The people who accept it as such are fools, and delude themselves. Life, as God gave it to us, is beautiful and noble—grandly suggestive of the Future beyond; but you will not tell me there is anything beautiful or noble or suggestive in the life led by such men and women as I saw to-day. With the exception of Madame Vassilius—and she, I am told, is considered eccentric and a ‘visionary’—I have seen no one who would be worth talking to for an hour. At Ainsworth’s dinner, for instance, there were some men who called themselves artists, and they talked, not of art, but of money; how much they could get, and how much they would get from certain patrons of theirs whom they called ‘full-pursed fools.’ Well, and that woman—that model I told you of—actually came to dine at Ainsworth’s table, and other coarse women like her. Surely, El-Râmi, you can imagine what their conversation was like? And as the time went on things became worse. There was no restraint, and at last I could stand it no longer. I rose up from the table, and left the room without a word. Ainsworth followed me; he was flushed with wine, and he looked foolish. ‘Where are you going?’ he asked. ‘Mamie Dillon,’ that was the name of his model, ‘wants to talk to you.’ I made him no answer. ‘Where are you going?’ he repeated angrily. ‘Home, of course,’ I replied, ‘I have stayed here too long as it is. Let me pass.’ He was excited; he had taken too much wine, I know, and he scarcely knew what he was saying. ‘Oh, I understand you!’ he exclaimed. ‘You and Irene Vassilius are of a piece—all purity, eh! all disgust at the manners and customs of the “lower animals.” Well, I tell you we are no worse than any one else in modern days. My lord the duke’s conversation differs very little from that of his groom; and the latest imported American heiress in search of a title rattles on to the full as volubly and ruthlessly as Mamie Dillon. Go home, if go you must; and take my advice, if you don’t like what you have seen in the world to-day, stay home for good. Stay in your shell, and dream your dreams; I dare say they will profit you quite as much as our realities!’ He laughed, and as I left him I said, ‘You mistake! it is you who are “dreaming,” as you call it; dreaming a bad dream, too; it is I who live.’ Then I went out of the house, as I tell you, and wandered alone, under the stars, and thought bitter things.”

“Why ‘bitter’?” asked El-Râmi.

“I do not know,” returned Féraz moodily, “except that all the world seemed wrong. I wondered how God could endure so much degradation on the face of one of His planets, without some grand, divine protest.”

“The protest is always there,” said El-Râmi quickly. “Silent, but eternal, in the existence of Good in the midst of Evil.”

Féraz lifted his eyes and rested their gaze on his brother with an expression of unutterable affection.

“El-Râmi, keep me with you!” he entreated; “never let me leave you again! I think I must be crazed if the world is what it seems, and my life is so entirely opposed to it; but, if so, I would rather be crazed than sane. In my wanderings to-night, on my way home hither, I met young girls and women who must have been devils in disguise, so utterly were they lost to every sense of womanhood and decency. I saw men, evil-looking and wretched, who seemed waiting but the chance to murder, or commit any other barbarous crime for gold. I saw little children, starving and in rags; old and feeble creatures, too, in the last stage of destitution, without a passer-by to wish them well; all things seemed foul and dark and hopeless, and when I entered here I felt—ah, God knows what I felt!—that you were my Providence, that this was my home, and that surely some Angel dwelt within and hallowed it with safety and pure blessing!”

A sudden remorse softened his voice, his beautiful eyes were dim with tears.

“He remembers and thinks of Lilith!” thought El-Râmi quickly, with a singular jealous tightening emotion at his heart; but aloud he said gently:

“If one day in the ‘world’ has taught you to love this simple abode of ours, my dear Féraz, more than you did before, you have had a most valuable lesson. But do not be too sure of yourself. Remember, you resented my authority, and you wished to escape from my influence. Well, now——”

“Now I voluntarily place myself under both,” said Féraz rising and standing before him with bent head. “El-Râmi, my brother and my friend, do with me as you will! If from you come my dreams, in God’s name let me dream! If from your potent will, exerted on my spirit, springs the fountain of the music which haunts my life, let me ever be a servant of that will! With you I have had happiness, health, peace, and mysterious joy, such as the world could never comprehend; away from you, though only for a day, I have been miserable. Take my complete obedience, El-Râmi, for what it is worth; you give me more than my life’s submission can ever repay.”

El-Râmi stepped up more closely to him, and, laying both hands on his shoulders, looked him seriously in the eyes.

“My dear boy, consider for a moment how you involve yourself,” he said earnestly, yet with great kindliness. “Remember the old Arabic volume you chanced upon, and what it said concerning the mystic powers of ‘influence.’ Did you quite realise it, and all that it implies?”

Féraz met his searching gaze steadily.

“Quite,” he replied. “So much and so plainly do I realise it that I even attribute everything done in the world to ‘influence.’ Each one of us is ‘influenced’ by something or some one. Even you, my dearest brother, share the common lot, though I dare say you do not quite perceive where your ruling force is generated, your own powers being so extraordinary. Ainsworth, for example, is ‘influenced’ in very opposite directions by very opposite forces—Irene Vassilius, and—his Mamie Dillon! Now I would rather have your spell laid upon my life than that of the speculator, the gambler, the drinker, or the vile woman, for none of these can possibly give satisfaction, at least not to me; while your wizard wand invokes nothing but beauty, harmony, and peace of conscience. So I repeat it, El-Râmi, I submit to you utterly and finally—must I entreat you to accept my submission?”

He smiled, and the old happy look that he was wont to wear began to radiate over his face, which had till then seemed worn and wearied. El-Râmi’s dark features appeared to reflect the smile, as he gently touched his brother’s clustering curls, and said playfully:

“In spite of Zaroba?”

“In spite of Zaroba,” echoed Féraz mirthfully. “Poor Zaroba! she does not seem well, or happy. I fear she has offended you?”

“No, no,” said El-Râmi meditatively, “she has not offended me; she is too old to offend me. I cannot be angry with sorrowful and helpless age. And, if she is not well, we will make her well, and if she is not happy we will make her happy, ... and be happy ourselves—shall it not be so?” His voice was very soft, and he seemed to talk at random, and to be conscious of it, for he roused himself with a slight start, and said in firmer tones: “Good-night, Féraz; good-night, dear lad. Rest, and dream!”

He smiled as Féraz impulsively caught his hand and kissed it, and after the young man had left the room he still stood, lost in a reverie, murmuring under his breath: “And be happy ourselves! Is that possible—could that be possible—in this world?”

XXVIII.

Next day towards noon, while Féraz, tired with his brief “worldly” experiences, was still sleeping. El-Râmi sought out Zaroba. She received him in the ante-room of the chamber of Lilith with more than her customary humility; her face was dark and weary, and her whole aspect one of resigned and settled melancholy. El-Râmi looked at her kindly, and with compassion.

“The sustaining of wrath is an injury to the spirit,” he wrote on the slate which served for that purpose in his usual way of communication with her; “I no longer mistrust you. Once more I say, be faithful and obedient. I ask no more. The spell of silence shall be lifted from your lips to-day.”

She read swiftly, and with apparent incredulity, and a tremor passed over her tall, gaunt frame. She looked at him wonderingly and wistfully, while he, standing before her, returned the look steadfastly, and seemed to be concentrating all his thoughts upon her with some fixed intention. After a minute or two he turned aside, and again wrote on the slate; this time the words ran thus:

“Speak; you are at liberty.”

With a deep shuddering sigh, she extended her hands appealingly.

“Master!” she exclaimed; and, before he could prevent her, she had dropped on her knees. “Forgive—forgive!” she muttered. “Terrible is thy power, O El-Râmi, ruler of spirits! terrible, mystic, and wonderful! God must have given thee thy force, and I am but the meanest of slaves to rebel against thy command. Yet out of wisdom comes not happiness, but great grief and pain; and as I live, El-Râmi, in my rebellion I but dreamed of a love that should bring thee joy! Pardon the excess of my zeal, for lo, again and yet again I swear fidelity! and may all the curses of heaven fall on me if this time I break my vow!”

She bent her head—she would have kissed the floor at his feet, but that he quickly raised her up and prevented her.

“There is nothing more to pardon,” he wrote. “Your wisdom is possibly greater than mine. I know there is nothing stronger than Love, nothing better perhaps; but Love is my foe whom I must vanquish,—lest he should vanquish me!”

And while Zaroba yet pored over these words, her black eyes dilating with amazement at the half confession of weakness implied in them, he turned away and left the room.

That afternoon a pleasant sense of peace and restfulness seemed to settle upon the little household; delicious strains of melody filled the air; Féraz, refreshed in mind and body by a sound sleep, was seated at the piano, improvising strange melodies in his own exquisitely wild and tender fashion; while El-Râmi, seated at his writing-table, indited a long letter to Dr. Kremlin at Ilfracombe, giving in full the message left for him by the mysterious monk from Cyprus respecting the “Third Ray” or signal from Mars.

“Do not weary yourself too much with watching this phenomenon,” he wrote to his friend. “From all accounts, it will be a difficult matter to track so rapid a flash on the Disc as the one indicated, and I have fears for your safety. I cannot give any satisfactory cause for my premonition of danger to you in the attempt, because, if we do not admit an end to anything, then there can be no danger even in death itself, which we are accustomed to look upon as an ‘end,’ when it may be proved to be only a beginning. But, putting aside the idea of ‘danger’ or ‘death,’ the premonition remains in my mind as one of ‘change’ for you; and perhaps you are not ready or willing even to accept a different sphere of action from your present one, therefore I would say, take heed to yourself when you follow the track of the ‘Third Ray.’”

Here his pen stopped abruptly; Féraz was singing in a soft mezza-voce, and he listened:

O Sweet, if love obtained must slay desire,

And quench the light and heat of passion’s fire;

If you are weary of the ways of love,

And fain would end the many cares thereof,

I prithee tell me so that I may seek

Some place to die in ere I grow too weak

To look my last on your belovèd face.

Yea, tell me all! The gods may yet have grace

And pity enough to let me quickly die

Some brief while after we have said ‘Good-bye!’

Nay, I have known it well for many days

You have grown tired of all tender ways;

Love’s kisses weary you, love’s eager words,

Old as the hills and sweet as singing-birds,

Are fetters hard to bear! O love, be free!

You will lose little joy in losing me;

Let me depart, remembering only this,

That once you loved me, and that once your kiss

Crown’d me with joy supreme enough to last

Through all my life till that brief life be past.

Forget me, Sweetest-heart, and nevermore

Turn to look back on what has gone before,

Or say, ‘Such love was brief, but wondrous fair;

The past is past for ever; have no care

Or thought for me at all, no tear or sigh,

Or faint regret; for, Dearest, I shall die

And dream of you i’ the dark, beneath the grass;

And o’er my head perchance your feet may pass,

Lulling me faster into sleep profound

Among the fairies of the fruitful ground.

Love, wearied out by love, hath need of rest.

And, when all love is ended, Death is best.

The song ceased; but, though the singer’s voice no longer charmed the silence, his fingers still wandered over the keys of the piano, devising intricate passages of melody as delicate and devious as the warbling of nightingales. El-Râmi, unconsciously to himself, heaved a deep sigh, and Féraz, hearing it, looked round.

“Am I disturbing you?” he asked.

“No. I love to hear you; but, like many youthful poets, you sing of what you scarcely understand—love, for instance; you know nothing of love.”

“I imagine I do,” replied Féraz meditatively. “I can picture my ideal woman; she is——”

“Fair, of course!” said El-Râmi, with an indulgent smile.

“Yes, fair; her hair must be golden, but not uniformly so—full of lights and shadows, suggestive of some halo woven round her brows by the sunlight, or the caressing touch of an angel. She must have deep, sweet eyes in which no actual colour is predominant; for a pronounced blue or black does away with warmth of expression. She must not be tall, for one cannot caress tall women without a sense of the ludicrous spoiling sentiment——”

“Have you tried it?” asked El-Râmi, laughing.

Féraz laughed too.

“You know I have not; I only imagine the situation. To explain more fully what I mean, I would say one could more readily draw into one’s arms the Venus of Medicis than that of Milo—one could venture to caress a Psyche, but scarcely a Juno. I have never liked the idea of tall women; they are like big handsome birds—useful, no doubt, but not half so sweet as the little fluttering singing ones.”

“Well, and what other attributes must this imagined lady of yours possess?” asked El-Râmi, vaguely amused at his brother’s earnestness.

“Oh, many more charms than I could enumerate,” replied Féraz. “And of one thing I am certain, she is not to be found on this earth. But I am quite satisfied to wait; I shall find her, even as she will find me some day. Meanwhile I ‘imagine’ love, and in imagination I almost feel it.”

He went on playing, and El-Râmi resumed the writing of his letter to Kremlin, which he soon finished and addressed ready for post. A gentle knock at the street door made itself heard just then through the ebb and flow of Féraz’s music, and Féraz left off his improvisation abruptly and went to answer the summons. He returned, and announced with some little excitement:

“Madame Irene Vassilius.”

El-Râmi rose and advanced to meet his fair visitor, bowing courteously.

“This is an unexpected pleasure, Madame,” he said, the sincerity of his welcome showing itself in the expression of his face, “and an unmerited honour for which I am grateful.”

She smiled, allowing her hand to rest in his for a moment; then, accepting the low chair which Féraz placed for her near his brother’s writing-table, she seated herself, and lifted her eyes to El-Râmi’s countenance—eyes which, like those of Féraz’s “ideal ladye-love,” were “deep and sweet, and of no pronounced colour.”

“I felt you would not resent my coming here as an intrusion,” she began; “but my visit is not one of curiosity. I do not want to probe you as to your knowledge of my past, or to ask you anything as to my future. I am a lonely creature, disliked by many people, and in the literary career I have adopted I fight a desperately hard battle, and often crave for a little—just a little sympathetic comprehension. One or two questions puzzle me which you might answer if you would. They are on almost general subjects; but I should like to have your opinion.”

“Madame, if you, with your exceptional gifts of insight and instinct, are baffled in these ‘general’ questions,” said El-Râmi, “shall not I be baffled also?”

“That does not follow,” replied Irene, returning his glance steadily, “for you men always claim to be wiser than women. I do not agree with this fiat, so absolutely set forth by the lords of creation; yet I am not what is termed ‘strong-minded,’ I simply seek justice. Pray stay with us,” she added, turning to Féraz, who was about to retire, as he usually did whenever El-Râmi held an interview with any visitor; “there is no occasion for you to go away.”

Féraz hesitated, glancing at his brother.

“Yes, by all means remain here, Féraz,” said El-Râmi gently, “since Madame Vassilius desires it.”

Delighted with the permission, Féraz ensconced himself in a corner with a book, pretending to read, but in reality listening to every word of the conversation. He liked to hear Irene’s voice—it was singularly sweet and ringing, and at times had a peculiar thrill of pathos in it that went straight to the heart.

“You know,” she went on, “that I am, or am supposed to be, what the world calls ‘famous.’ That is, I write books which the public clamour for and read, and for which I receive large sums of money. I am able to live well, dress well, and look well, and I am known as one of society’s ‘celebrities.’ Well, now, can you tell me why, for such poor honours as these, men, supposed to be our wiser and stronger superiors, are so spitefully jealous of a woman’s fame?”

“Jealous?” echoed El-Râmi dubiously, and with something of hesitation. “You mean——”

“I mean what I say,” continued Madame Vassilius calmly; “neither more nor less. Spitefully jealous is the term I used. Explain to me this riddle: Why do men encourage women to every sort of base folly and vanity that may lead them at length to become the slaves of man’s lust and cruelty, and yet take every possible means to oppose and hinder them in their attempts to escape from sensuality and animalism into intellectual progress and pre-eminence? In looking back on the history of all famous women, from Sappho downwards to the present time, it is amazing to consider what men have said of them. Always a sneer at ‘women’s work.’ And, if praise is at any time given, how grudging and half-hearted it is! Men will enter no protest against women who uncover their bare limbs to the public gaze and dance lewdly in music-halls and theatres for the masculine delectation; they will defend the street prostitute; they will pledge themselves and their family estates in order to provide jewels for the newest ‘ballerina’; but for the woman of intellect they have nothing but a shrug of contempt. If she produces a great work of art in literature, it is never thoroughly acknowledged; and the hard blows delivered on Charlotte Bronté, George Eliot, Georges Sand, and others of their calibre, far outweighed their laurels. George Eliot and Georges Sand took men’s names in order to shelter themselves a little from the pitiless storm that assails literary work known to emanate from a woman’s brain; but let a man write the veriest trash that ever was printed, he will still be accredited by his own sex with something better than ever the cleverest woman could compass. How is it that the ‘superior’ sex are cowardly enough to throw stones at those among the ‘inferior,’ who surpass their so-called lords and masters both in chastity and intellect?”

She spoke earnestly, her eyes shining with emotion; she looked lovely, thus inspired by the strength of her inward feelings. El-Râmi was taken aback. Like most Orientals, he had to a certain extent despised women and their work. But, then, what of Lilith? Without her aid would his discoveries in spiritual science have progressed so far? Had he or any man a right to call woman the “inferior” sex?

“Madame,” he said slowly and with a vague embarrassment, “you bring an accusation against our sex which it is impossible to refute, because it is simply and undeniably true. Men do not love either chastity or intellect in women.”

He paused, looking at her, then went on:

“A chaste woman is an embodied defiance and reproach to man; an intellectual woman is always a source of irritation, because she is invariably his superior. By this I mean that when a woman is thoroughly gifted she is gifted all round; an intellectual man is generally only gifted in one direction. For example, a great poet, painter, or musician, may be admirable in his own line, but he generally lacks in something; he is stupid, perhaps, in conversation, or he blunders in some way by want of tact; but a truly brilliant woman has all the charms of mental superiority, generally combined with delicate touches of satire, humour, and wit,—points which she uses to perfection against the lumbering animal Man, with the result that she succeeds in pricking him in all his most vulnerable parts. He detests her accordingly, and flies for consolation to the empty-headed dolls of the music-hall, who flatter him to the top of his bent, in order to get as much champagne and as many diamonds as they can out of him. Man must be adored; he insists upon it, even if he pays for it!”

“It is a pity he does not make himself a little more worthy of adoration,” said Irene, with a slight scornful smile.

“It is,” agreed El-Râmi; “but most men, even the ugliest and stupidest, consider themselves perfect.”

“Do you?” she asked suddenly.

“Do I consider myself perfect?” El-Râmi smiled and reflected on this point. “Madame, if I am frank with you, and with myself, I must answer ‘Yes!’ I am made of the same clay as all my sex, and consider myself worthy to be the conqueror of any woman under the sun! Ask any loathsome, crooked-backed dwarf that sweeps a crossing for his livelihood, and his idea of his own personal charm will be the same.”

Féraz laughed outright; Madame Vassilius looked amused and interested.

“You can never eradicate from the masculine nature,” proceeded El-Râmi, “the idea that our attentions, no matter how uncouth, are, and always must be, agreeable to the feminine temperament. Here you have the whole secret of the battle carried on by men against women who have won the prize of a world-wide fame. An intellectual woman sets a barrier between herself and the beasts; the beasts howl, but cannot leap it; hence their rage. You, Madame, are not only intellectual, but lovely to look at; you stand apart, a crowned queen, seeking no assistance from men; by your very manner you imply your scorn of their low and base desires. They must detest you in self-defence; most of your adverse critics are the poorly-paid hacks of the daily journals, who envy you your house, your horses, your good fortune, and your popularity with the public; if you want them to admire you, go in for a big scandal. Run away with some blackguard; have several husbands; do something to tarnish your woman’s reputation; be a vulture or a worm, not a star; men do not care for stars, they are too distant, too cold, too pure!”

“Are you speaking satirically,” asked Madame Vassilius, “or in grim earnest?”

“In grim earnest, fair lady,” and El-Râmi rose from his chair and confronted her with a half-smile. “In grim earnest, men are brutes! The statement is one which is frequently made by what is called the ‘Shrieking Sisterhood’; but I, a man, agree to it in cold blood, without conditions. We are stupid brutes; we work well in gangs, but not so well singly. As soldiers, sailors, builders, engineers, labourers, all on the gang method, we are admirable. The finest paintings of the world were produced by bodies of men working under one head, called ‘schools,’ but differing from our modern ‘schools’ in this grand exception, that, whereas now each pupil tries his hand at something of his own, then all the pupils worked at the one design of the Master. Thus were painted the frescoes of Michael Angelo, and the chief works of Raphael. Now the rule is ‘every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.’ And very poorly does ‘each man for himself’ succeed. Men must always be helped along, either by each other—or ... by ... a woman! Many of them owe all their success in life to the delicate management and patient tact of woman, and yet never have the grace to own it. Herein we are thankless brutes as well as stupid. But, as far as I personally am concerned, I am willing to admit that all my best discoveries, such as they are, are due to the far-reaching intelligence and pure insight of a woman.”

This remark utterly amazed Féraz; Madame Vassilius looked surprised.

“Then,” she said, smiling slightly, “of course you love some one?”

A shadow swept over El-Râmi’s features.

“No, Madame; I am not capable of love, as this world understands loving. Love has existence, no doubt, but surely not as Humanity accepts it. For example, a man loves a woman; she dies; he gradually forgets her, and loves another, and so on. That is not love, but it is what society is satisfied with, as such. You are quite right to despise such a fleeting emotion for yourself; it is not sufficient for the demands of your nature; you seek something more lasting.”

“Which I shall never find,” said Irene quietly.

“Which you will find, and which you must find,” declared El-Râmi. “All longings, however vague, whether evil or good, are bound to be fulfilled, there being no waste in the economy of the universe. This is why it is so necessary to weigh well the results of desire before encouraging it. I quite understand your present humour, Madame—it is one of restlessness and discontent. You find your crown of fame has thorns; never mind! wear it royally, though the blood flows from the torn brows. You are solitary at times, and find the solitude irksome; Art serves her children thus—she will accept no half-love, but takes all. Were I asked to name one of the most fortunate of women, I think I should name you, for, notwithstanding the progress of your intellectual capacity, you have kept your faith.”

“I have kept my religion, if you mean that,” said Irene, impressed by his earnestness; “but it is not the religion of the churches.”

He gave an impatient gesture.

“The religion of the churches is a mere Show-Sunday,” he returned. “We all know that. When I say you have kept your faith, I mean that you can believe in God without positive proofs of Him. That is a grand capability in this age. I wish I had it!”

Irene Vassilius looked at him wonderingly.

“Surely you believe in God?”

“Not till I can prove Him!” and El-Râmi’s eyes flashed defiantly. “Vice triumphant, and Virtue vanquished, do not explain Him to me. Torture and death do not manifest to my spirit His much-talked-of ‘love and goodness.’ I must unriddle His secret; I must pierce into the heart of His plan, before I join the enforced laudations of the multitude; I must know and feel that it is the truth I am proclaiming, before I stand up in the sight of my fellows and say, ‘O God, Thou art the Fountain of Goodness, and all Thy works are wise and wonderful!’”

He spoke with remarkable power and emphasis; his attitude was full of dignity. Madame Vassilius gazed at him in involuntary admiration.

“It is a bold spirit that undertakes to catechise the Creator and examine into the value of His creation,” she said.

“If there is a Creator,” said El-Râmi, “and if from Him all things do come, then from Him also comes my spirit of inquiry. I have no belief in a devil, but, if there were one, the Creator is answerable for him, too. And to revert again to your questions, Madame, shall we not in a way make God somewhat responsible for the universal prostitution of woman? It is a world-wide crime, and only very slight attempts as yet have been made to remedy it, because the making of the laws is in the hands of men—the criminals. The Englishman, the European generally, is as great a destroyer of woman’s life and happiness as any Turk or other barbarian. The life of the average woman is purely animal; in her girlhood she is made to look attractive, and her days pass into the consideration of dress, appearance, manner, and conversation; when she has secured her mate, her next business is to bear him children. The children reared, and sent out into the world, she settles down into old age, wrinkled, fat, toothless, and frequently quarrelsome; the whole of her existence is not a grade higher than that of a leopardess or other forest creature, and sometimes not so exciting. When a woman rises above all this, she is voted by the men ‘unwomanly’; she is no longer the slave or the toy of their passions; and that is why, my dear Madame, they give the music-hall dancer their diamonds, and heap upon you their sneers.”

Irene sat silent for some minutes, and a sigh escaped her.

“Then it is no use trying to be a little different from the rest,” she said wearily; “a little higher, a little less prone to vulgarity? If one must be hated for striving to be worthy of one’s vocation——”

“My dear lady, you do not see that men will never admit that literature is your vocation! No, not even if you wrote as grand a tragedy as ‘Macbeth.’ Your vocation, according to them, is to adore their sex, to look fascinating, to wear pretty clothes, and purr softly like a pleased cat when they make you a compliment; not to write books that set everybody talking. They would rather see you dragged and worn to death under the burden of half a dozen children, than they would see you stepping disdainfully past them, in all the glory of fame. Yet be content,—you have, like Mary in the Gospel, ‘chosen the better part;’ of that I feel sure, though I am unable to tell you why or how I feel it.”

“If you feel sure of certain things without being able to explain how or why you feel them,” put in Féraz suddenly, “is it not equally easy to feel sure of God without being able to explain how or why He exists?”

“Admirably suggested, my dear Féraz,” observed El-Râmi, with a slight smile. “But please recollect that, though it may be easy to you and a fair romancist like Madame Vassilius to feel sure of God, it is not at all easy to me. I am not sure of Him; I have not seen Him, and I am not conscious of Him. Moreover, if an average majority of people taken at random could be persuaded to speak the truth for once in their lives, they would all say the same thing—that they are not conscious of Him. Because if they were—if the world were—the emotion of fear would be altogether annihilated; there would never be any ‘panic’ about anything; people would not shriek and wail at the terrors of an earthquake, or be seized with pallor and trembling at the crash and horror of an unexpected storm. Being sure of God would mean being sure of Good; and I’m afraid none of us are convinced in that direction. But I think and believe that, if we indeed felt sure of God, evil would be annihilated as well as fear. And the mystery is, why does He not make us sure of Him? It must be in His power to do so, and would save both Him and us an infinite deal of trouble.”

Féraz grew restless and left his place, laying down the volume he had been pretending to read.

“I wish you would not be so horribly, cruelly definite in your suggestions,” he said rather vexedly. “What is the good of it? It unsettles one’s mind.”

“Surely your mind is not unsettled by a merely reasonable idea reasonably suggested?” returned El-Râmi calmly. “Madame Vassilius here is not ‘unsettled,’ as you call it.”

“No,” said Irene slowly; “but I had thought you more of a spiritual believer——”

“Madame,” said El-Râmi impressively, “I am a spiritual believer, but in this way: I believe that this world and all worlds are composed of Spirit and Matter, and not only do I believe it, but I know it! The atmosphere around us and all planets is composed of Spirit and Matter; and every living creature that breathes is made of the same dual mixture. Of the Spirit that forms part of Matter and dominates it, I, even I have some control; and others who come after me, treading in the same lines of thought, will have more than I. I can influence the spirit of man; I can influence the spirit of the air; I can draw an essence from the earth upwards that shall seem to you like the wraith of some one dead; but if you ask me whether these provable, practicable scientific tests or experiments on the spirit, that is part of Nature’s very existence, are manifestations of God or the Divine, I say—No. God would not permit Man to play at will with His eternal Fires; whereas, with the spirit essence that can be chemically drawn from earth and fire and water, I, a mere studious and considering biped, can do whatsoever I choose. I know how the legends of phantoms and fairies arose in the world’s history, because at one time, one particular period of the prehistoric ages, the peculiar, yet natural combination of the elements and the atmosphere formed ‘fantasma’ which men saw and believed in. The last trace of these now existing is the familiar ‘mirage’ of cities with their domes and steeples seen during certain states of the atmosphere in mid-ocean. Only give me the conditions, and I will summon up a ghostly city too. I can form numberless phantasmal figures now, and more than this, I can evoke for your ears, from the very bosom of the air, music such as long ago sounded for the pleasure of men and women dead. For the air is a better phonograph than Edison’s, and has the advantage of being eternal.”

“But such powers are marvellous!” exclaimed Irene. “I cannot understand how you have attained to them.”

“Neither can others less gifted understand how you Madame, have attained your literary skill,” said El-Râmi “All art, all science, all discovery, is the result of a concentrated Will, an indomitable Perseverance. My ‘powers,’ as you term them, are really very slight, and, as I said before, those who follow my track will obtain far greater supremacy. The secret of phantasmal splendour or ‘vision,’ as also the clue to what is called ‘unearthly music’—anything and everything that is or pretends to be of a supernatural character in this world—can be traced to natural causes, and the one key to it all is the great fact that nothing in the Universe is lost. Bear that statement well in mind. Light preserves all scenes; Air preserves all sounds. Therefore, it follows that if the scenes are there, and the sounds are there, they can be evoked again, and yet again, by him who has the skill to understand the fluctuations of the atmospheric waves, and the incessantly recurring vibrations of light. Do not imagine that even a thought, which you very naturally consider your own, actually remains a fixture in your brain from whence it was germinated. It escapes while you are in the very act of thinking it; its subtle essence evaporates into the air you breathe and the light you absorb. If it presents itself to you again, it will probably be in quite a different form, and perhaps you will hardly recognise it. All thought escapes thus; you cannot keep it to yourself any more than you can have breath without breathing.”

“You mean that a thought belongs to all, and not to one individual?” said Irene.

“Yes, I mean that,” replied El-Râmi; “and thought, I may say, is the only reflex I can admit of possible Deity, because thought is free, absolute, all-embracing, creative, perpetual, and unwearied. Limitless too—great Heaven, how limitless! To what heights does it not soar? In what depths does it not burrow? How daring, how calm, how indifferent to the ocean-swell of approaching and receding ages! Your modern Theosophist, calmly counting his gains from the blind incredulity and stupidity of the unthinking masses, is only copying, in a very Liliputian manner, the grand sagacity and cunning of the ancient Egyptian ‘magi,’ who, by scientific trickery, ruled the ignorant multitude; it is the same thought, only dressed in modern aspect. Thought, and the proper condensation, controlling and usage of thought, is Power,—Divinity, if you will. And it is the only existing Force that can make gods of men.”

Irene Vassilius sat silent, fascinated by his words, and still more fascinated by his manner. After a few minutes she spoke—

“I am glad you admit,” she said gently, “that this all-potent Thought may be a reflex of the Divine,—for we can have no reflections of light without the Light itself. I came to you in a somewhat discontented humour,—I am happier now. I suppose I ought to be satisfied with my lot,—I am certainly more fortunately situated than most women.”

“You are, Madame”—said El-Râmi, smiling pensively and fixing his dark eyes upon her with a kind expression,—“And your native good sense and wit will prevent you, I hope, from marring the good which the gods have provided for you. Do not marry yet,—it would be too great a disillusion for you. The smallest touch of prose is sufficient to destroy the delicacy of love’s finer sentiments; and marriage, as the married will tell you, is all prose,—very prosy prose too. Avoid it!—prosy prose is tiresome reading.”

She laughed, and rose to take her leave.

“I saw your brother with Mr. Ainsworth yesterday,” she observed—“And I could not understand how two such opposite natures could possibly agree.”

“Oh, we did not agree,—we have not agreed,” said Féraz hastily, speaking for himself—“It is not likely we shall see much of each other.”

“I am glad to hear it”—and she extended her hand to him, “You are very young, and Roy Ainsworth is very old, not in years, but in heart. It would be a pity for you to catch the contagion of our modern pessimism.”

“But——” Féraz hesitated and stammered, “it was you, was it not, Madame, who suggested to Mr. Ainsworth that he should take me as the model for one of the figures in his picture?”

“Yes, it was I,” replied Irene with a slight smile—“But I never thought you would consent,—and I felt sure that, even if you did, he would never succeed in rendering your expression, for he is a mere surface-painter of flesh, not soul—still, all the same, it amused me to make the suggestion.”

“Yes,—woman-like,” said El-Râmi—“You took pleasure in offering him a task he could not fulfil. There you have another reason why intellectual women are frequently detested—they ask so much and give so little.”

“You wrong us,” answered Irene swiftly. “When we love, we give all!”

“And so you give too much!” said El-Râmi gravely—“It is the common fault of women. You should never give ‘all’—you should always hold back something. To be fascinating, you should be enigmatical. When once man is allowed to understand your riddle thoroughly, the spell is broken. The placid, changeless, monotonously amiable woman has no power whatever over the masculine temperament. It is Cleopatra that makes a slave of Antony, not blameless and simple Octavia.”