In Both Worlds Part 34

An irresistible desire to look him full in the face seized me. Whether it was a secret magnetic attraction compelling me to do so, or whether I thought it might mitigate my painful and absurd tension of thought on the subject, I yielded at last. From that moment his triumph was complete. It was veritably the fascination of the bird by the serpent. I could not help gazing at him. He seemed to absorb my whole nervous life, to suck out the very spirit of my blood, so that I was left breathless, dizzy, bewildered, helpless, after each of his terrible visitations.

Thus I lived a daily death for many weeks; ignorant of all things without; never hearing the sound of a human voice; buried alive; until hope died in my bosom, and despair became my bedfellow, and fear my familiar, and even memory ceased to weave her beautiful airy tissues, consoling me for the loss of a future by her glorification of the past.

At first I used to love to review all the incidents of my life, both on earth and in the world of spirits. I spent my long and lonesome leisure in organizing my knowledge, a.n.a.lyzing my experiences, and building up from them a grand philosophy of mind and matter.

I saw plainly that such a philosophy was needed to give intellectual strength and stability to the young church of Christ. I knew that no height of piety, no fervor of faith, no frenzy of love can secure a church from the cold and critical a.s.saults of the human understanding. Devotion may be the soul of a church, but Truth is its body: and no religion without an impregnable basis of philosophy, can be anything but a transient fervor. It must inevitably perish by a gradual disintegration.

For this mode of thinking I was indebted to the Athenian philosophers.

The disciples of Christ had no such foundation upon which to erect the great theological truths they were going to teach. I saw plainly that such a philosophy cannot be discovered by the human intellect: and moreover that it can only be revealed to mankind through some one who has lived consciously for a while in both worlds. By divine permission and protection I had so lived. I had been put into possession of truths of the utmost importance to the infant church and the world. Surely I could not thus perish in a dungeon! Surely the Lord who had raised me from the dead, would deliver me also from this great snare; so that I could delight and instruct mankind with what I had seen and heard in the spiritual world.

I therefore arranged all my ideas into philosophical form, and contemplated with intense pleasure the perfect system of spiritual and natural truth which I had eliminated from my acc.u.mulated materials. It is astonishing how one spiritual truth leads to another; how all things are connected together; so that the greatest things are repeated in the least, and the smallest fragment is an image of the whole.

With increasing debility and despair I ceased to think steadily of these grand and beautiful subjects. I spent much of the time in praying for deliverance, and much in brooding over the possible fate and sorrows of my poor sisters. After a while I discovered that my ideas were strangely confused, especially after those terrible visits of Magistus, which I began to regard with absolute horror. I could not distinguish between what had happened in one world and what in the other; between dreams and realities; between my hopes and my fears. The awful suspicion broke upon me that I was losing my reason, that I was on the verge of madness.

Then it was that my courage failed and my pride humbled itself; for when Magistus next appeared, I raised my hands supplicatingly to him and exclaimed:

"Oh, my uncle! why do you thus persecute an innocent and helpless creature? May G.o.d have mercy on your soul as you shall have mercy on me!"

He made no reply, but stared fixedly at me. Not a muscle of his face moved. No ray of emotion was visible on his features. He seemed to be as deaf and dumb as a statue. I might as well have appealed to a tiger or a crocodile for pity. I was about to repeat my supplication, but his look appalled me; and I sank, pale, rigid and stupefied under the old spell of fascination.

There was no hope.

Let no one suppose that this instance of cruelty is incredible. Its hereditary germ is concealed in our hearts. It begins developing in the child when he tortures the dumb creatures in his power. To delight in witnessing pain is the basest and most infernal of all our pa.s.sions; but it is common enough. Every court, every camp, every government, and alas!

almost every religion in the world, has its secret records which could unfold tales of horror worse even than this. Man invested with irresponsible power, is naturally a tyrant; and the difference between a tyrant and a devil consists only in their different degrees of development.

I learned, moreover, in the spiritual world the singular fact, that men or women addicted to sensual pleasures unregulated by religious ideas, however kind and gentle they may seem, have in their hearts a tendency to the most direful cruelties which rarely come to the surface in this world, but which rage in h.e.l.l with unabating fury.

One morning a wonderful thing occurred. How small a thing may seem wonderful to those who are shut out from the sweet presences of man and nature!

On taking the bread and water out of the basket, I found a delicate little rose-bud at the bottom of it. Let those who see every day a thousand flowers in the golden palaces of the spring, pity and excuse the frantic pleasure which this tiny one gave to a poor prisoner, who had been shut up for months in darkness, surrounded by stone walls and demons.

I seized the sweet messenger of love, for such I construed it to be; strained my eyes in the twilight to discover the green and crimson of its livery; and imagined that its delicate perfume was a little voice whispering to me of pity and of succor. I wept over it. I kissed it. I invested it with life. I called it Mercury, Iris, Hebe, Cupid, Apollo-as a child endows her doll with vitality, speaks to it, caresses it, nurses it.

Perhaps all nature would be alive to us if our hearts were only childlike.

This flower was a link that reconnected me with the great world above, so long lost to me. It was a delicate thread that led me up into the open air under the blue sky, and out into the green fields and into the gardens where the winds wrestled playfully with the trees, and all the flowers ducked their little heads at the great rough sport of the larger creatures. The beautiful forms and colors of a luxuriant nature rushed upon me with a ravishing sweetness. My memory and imagination were stimulated into rosy life. I wept for joy.

The secret of all this happiness was, that the rose-bud reconnected me with my fellow-men. Some one had got hold of the basket who knew my sad story, pitied my fate, and had sent me a message of comfort. I was confirmed in this idea when I broke open my loaf of bread; for I found a slice of meat concealed within it, juicy and delicious. This was the first variation from my diet of slow starvation. It was clearly the secret, cautious work of a friend. Help was coming; my heart danced with hope.

This little event shed still greater light and blessing upon me. My mind became clear; my memory acute; the fear of madness left me. My past sufferings seemed like a dream. With hope I received new life, new courage. When Magistus came, I found that I was freed from the spell of his fascination. I did not look at him. I sat down immediately underneath his window. I repeated comforting verses of Scripture to myself until he went away.

That day was spent in the most delicious castle-building. At night I slept, but was visited by a disagreeable dream. I thought Magistus had taken my rose-bud from me, and buried it in the ground; and I awoke with a great cry, for I suddenly remembered that what we had called the rose-bud was my sister Mary.

How eagerly I watched the next descent of the basket, for more comfort, more tokens of love, more hope! It came; but there was in it only bread and water. My heart sank within me. I would have called out loudly to my unseen friend, to know why I was deserted; but I feared my unseen enemy; for I felt certain that Magistus always watched the person who let down the basket.

Magistus came as usual; and I sat, not noticing him, underneath the window. He seemed annoyed at my indifference. He shifted his position often and stayed a great while. He missed the pleasure of contemplating his work in my ghastly and pallid face.

The same things occurred the next day and the next. No more flowers; no more meat; no messages; no hopes; only bread, water and Magistus. Was it all a hallucination? Again I began to sicken and despair.

One morning the basket came down with only bread in it. No water! I knew it was a sentence of death. Magistus was revenging my escape from the fascination of his evil eye. Before night I began to feel the horrors of thirst. Awful sensation! I dreamed of water; of the fountain in my father's courtyard; of the blue aegean near Athens, so soft, so beautiful; of the Salt Sea and the tent of Barabbas; of the snow-fields and icebergs of the frozen zone in the world of spirits.

All, all depended on the next descent of the little basket. I watched its coming as a prisoner listens to the voice of the judge, for life or death.

Alas! bread alone; no water. Torture, madness, death, were now inevitable.

I took out the loaf, which somehow or other seemed heavier than usual. To my amazement, the basket did not rise, but was jerked impatiently up and down by the person holding the cord.

"What can this mean?" said I to myself.

I broke the loaf. It was scooped out and contained, in the cavity thus formed, a piece of parchment and a very small ink-horn with a pen.

I hastily examined the parchment and found on one side of it in great sprawling letters, like a child's writing, these words:

"What shall I do?"

A light came into my mind as brilliant as the sun. I was calm and self-possessed; my good angel recalled to me the friendly words of Pilate at our parting:

"Send for me if you get into trouble."

I wrote as clearly and as rapidly as possible in the dim twilight:

"Tell all to Pontius Pilate. Be quick or I die!"

I put the parchment into the loaf and pressed its crust closely together again.

I now heard the stern voice of Magistus exclaim to some one:

"What are you dallying about?"

The basket ascended. I trembled. I almost fainted. My entire hope, my life, hung upon a thread-upon a hair!

How fortunate it was that I did not send up the parchment alone! My good angel guided me. Magistus looked into the basket, and seeing it ascend with the loaf in it, exclaimed,

"He is too weak to take out his bread. I will give him a little wine."

He seemed to walk away and my heart commenced beating again.

At that moment another little flower, another sunbeam, fell from the ceiling to my feet: and the lid was closed.

High hope in my soul obliterated for a time even the torture of thirst. I was calm. I was happy. My invisible friend had received my message. If he delivered it, I was safe: for Pilate would certainly release me. What if Pilate was absent or dead or displaced? Such thoughts were torture. Still, the new governor, whoever he was, would befriend me. I determined not to give way until night.

Magistus came earlier than usual, and threw me down a goat-skin bottle of wine and water. I thanked him with the utmost deliberation. He did not speak in reply. He only wished to fan the embers of life, to prolong my sufferings. Human nature revolts at the contemplation of such a demon.

Such men are indeed rare, but such evil spirits are common. They are present to our souls; cunning, cruel, malignant; infusing their poison into our thoughts and affections; endeavoring to make us such as Magistus.

The worst evils here are moderated and repressed by the counteracting pressure of good spheres. To see evil in its true light, you must see it in the world of spirits and in h.e.l.l-evil utterly divorced from good, projecting itself outwardly in its own brutal forms, and working out its frightful destiny.

I waited for my deliverance with a sublime hope, a calm and fixed faith. I knew it was coming. It came.

Magistus had at length reached, as all wicked men do either in this world or the next, the limit of his power, the fatal line; after which comes the rebound, the reaction, the punishment, the disgrace, the sure recoil upon one's self of all the evil he meditates against others.

Early in the afternoon I became aware that a great commotion was going on in the house. The door into the narrow pa.s.sage was broken open by axes; for Magistus always carried the key, and he could not be found. A Roman centurion soon appeared at the window where Magistus had so often stood.