The Master-Knot of Human Fate Part 10

"Wait a moment," he said, "just where you are, dear, and say this with me:--

"'Over running water: my love I give to you, my life I pledge to you, my heart I take not back from you while this water runs.

"'Over running water: every seventh year, at this time of the year, at this hour of the night, I will meet you here to renew my troth; death alone to relieve me of this vow.'"

"Is that all?" she asked wonderingly. "Over running water, while this water runs, while there is any snow in the mountains, or rivers upon land, or waters in the seas, or clouds in the skies, when the world is old, and the sun burned out, and time grows weary, I shall love you still, always and forever. What is it all about, love?" He clasped her close, and did not answer at once. "Don't you know that old Irish troth," he said, "which would have been enough, even in that hard, unromantic world of ours, to have made you legally my wife, if said over any Scottish stream? I thought you knew; you are sure I would not trick you? You know I could not?" He put her head back on his shoulder and looked into her shining eyes. It seemed to him he could not bear even a look of reproach. She raised her hands almost as if she were placing an invisible crown upon his head, and let her arms fall about his shoulders.

"Then I am your wife while living water runs?"

"Forever and forever," he replied.

"Oh, wait, wait just a little," she answered.

XVI

All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in trust, and that they are to account for their conduct in that trust to the one great Master, Author, and Founder of society.

BURKE.

Adam found a note beside his plate in the morning. "I will be back before five o'clock," it said; "I must think." He did not sit down to the table she had spread for him, but called the dogs; Prince was missing, and this was a relief to him. Nothing could happen to her when Prince was with her. His first impulse was to follow her, but he repelled it, and he too sat down to think. La.s.sie whined uneasily, and he stroked her head absent-mindedly, and finally went out and tried to work. The hours dragged away, and by four o'clock he could stand it no longer. He went to the gateway. As he unfastened it, he saw her coming toward him, but she stopped and he joined her, and together they turned back to the boulder. He noticed that she was very white, and that her eyes looked as if she had not slept, but he only said, "Have you thought?"

"Yes," she answered, "I have thought."

"And decided?"

"No," she said wearily; "we must decide together. We are not children, Adam, nor are we in any way the prototypes of those first parents of ours. I think sometimes that ever since their day their children have been walking in a blind circle, eating not the fruit of knowledge, but of the knowledge of good and evil. And what do we know, you and I, after all these years? Are you sure what we ought to do? It is as if G.o.d had taken us into a conspiracy to renew the old, or create a new, scheme of existence. Possibly we are being tried, tested, to prove whether or not we have learned our lesson. We must be brave enough to think, not what is our will, but what is our duty. Think of the awful responsibility, whichever way we choose."

"I can't," said Adam. "I can't think of anything but you."

"Nor I of aught but you," she said, moving away, "when you hold me so.

But we _must_ think."

"I have," answered Adam, gravely. "All my life I have thought. I have wanted the perfect companionship of the one woman in all the world who could give it; I have always known she would come. I have wanted a home; I have wanted to see my sons and daughters grow up about me. I wanted to be a power for good in this world of which we are a part, and where we live for some good purpose, if there be any purpose in life. I have so conducted myself that I can look a good woman in the face, and offer her my life, for whatever it is worth, without d.a.m.ning recollections to come between us. My children will have a clean heritage of blood and name. The family tree was scoffed at in America, but, thank G.o.d, mine was an oak that had weathered many a gale. Not very great folk, but honest, upright, fearless men and women, true to their king or their country and their faiths; true to their ideals, too, when their fellows were content with realities only. Any man who gives his children such a heritage as that can say with more truth than Napoleon said to his soldiers, 'Fifty centuries look down upon you.' I wanted to make the world a little better for my life, and I wanted my children brought up to feel that their lives belonged first to their country, to live or die for her."

"I know," said Robin, softly; "I used to think I would drape the flag over my baby's cradle, and embroider it on his pinning blanket."

"We are probably a pair of sentimental fools," he went on, "but I believe in sentiment. A man could not say this out loud because sentiment was supposed to be essentially womanish. How those old distinctions weary one, with their scientific data to prove that men surpa.s.s women in the senses of feeling and taste, while women have better sight and hearing, and so on through every conceivable maundering of the human brain, forever harping on differences and accentuating them, forever dwelling on s.e.x distinctions and never on a common humanity."

"It was a dreadfully scientific age," she a.s.sented, "a generation fearfully and wonderfully given over to statistics; and yet how many dreamers there were!"

"Yes, but in the twentieth century a young man dreamed dreams and saw visions at his own risk. While he dreamed of the brotherhood of man, his cla.s.smate with the corporation practice distanced him in the pursuit of position. While he led himself through the valley of the shadow of temptation, and feared no evil because of the Madonna vision in his soul, even the Madonnas preferred Lancelot and Tristram to Galahad. It wasn't an easy world for a man who wanted to keep faith with himself. It was a pinchbeck world, of pretence and pull,--that world that lies drowned out there. And yet I believe it was infinitely better than the lost Atlantis, better than the deluged planet of Noah, n.o.bler and finer than the best civilization of which we have any trace. I never despaired of it, and yet as I grew older I wondered if I was not foolish and mistaken in daring to hope and to dream."

"I know," she said again. "I think I did despair, for it seemed to me a dreadful, a terrible world. I used to wonder how conscientious men and women could bring other human beings into it, to be and to suffer and to faint in the frantic struggle for the unrealities that made us miserable or happy. Consider how paltry they were. If we built a new house, we were infinitely more concerned to see that the contractor used pressed brick than we were to see that the construction of our own characters was true. When we grew wealthy we moved into houses of more stories; but how often did we say: 'Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul'? I had as clean and strong a heritage as you, but a different one. It is no use to comfort oneself with nice little aphorisms about the needle's eye, and saws about filthy lucre, and telling G.o.d's estimate of money from the kind of people He gives it to; I tell you biting poverty is a terrible thing, an unspeakable thing. It is a misfortune for a child to grow up under a sense of injustice. I used to have times of revolt against it all, when I hated with the blind, ferocious hate of a child, and I saw what David never saw,--the righteous forsaken, and his seed begging, not bread, but a chance to earn his bread, and begging for it without being able to make just terms. I saw my home sold under the sheriff's hammer, and my parents struggle all their lives because of the lack of money, when they had everything else, n.o.bility, character, truth, and education.

My girlhood was a long series of going-withouts. Finally I married a man who promised me everything. Ah, well, when has the Apple of Sodom failed to deceive the eye and undeceive the tongue? At least he did care for my voice, and through that I learned that all those years I had carried in my own throat the golden notes to have altered everything, and I sang a little gladness into my parents' lives before they ended, thank G.o.d."

"How did you come to sing in opera? Do not tell me if the recollection is unpleasant. I wondered then."

"Because after--after things went wrong, I could not take his money. I knew how to sing, and I loved it; but even there it was the same story of suspicion and jealousy, till it seemed to me that hate and fear ruled the world. I went to so many, many cities, but there was no city beautiful, and in all the country I found no Arcady. I had money then, it is true; but the jingle of the guinea doesn't help the artist who sings, or paints, or writes, or plays, because G.o.d has put it into his soul to do this thing; at least not after the very first, when it stands as a tangible a.s.surance of success. The cities were 'cities of dreadful night,' and awful days; there were places that were not hives, but styes of human beings, fighting for what they called life, to die, never having lived. Sometimes I went into those jungles of civilization and sang to them. It was the only thing I could give them all. It was there I got my lesson. I had been singing 'All Tears,'

when an old woman said in her feeble, trembling voice, 'Ye mun loe us, young leddy, to come to sic a place an' sing o' Him wha sa loed the warld that He sent His only begotten Son ta it, for it's only great loe that casts out fear, and this is a fearsome spot.' Since then I haven't hated anything, except wanton cruelty, and I know love rules when it is fearless, but that is very seldom. We were afraid to say, I love you, to anything more sensitive than a stray kitten, though the world has hungered and thirsted after the love we have feared to give even to our own children. And yet just the love a man and woman may bear each other, unconsciously, is enough to transform the earth. We have not been cross to each other; I do not believe we have spoken unkindly to anything this year."

He drew her into his arms. "Is it enough to regenerate the earth?"

"And keep it regenerated?" she echoed. "Do you know?"

"Do you remember telling me, long ago, of a story in which the woman said she had never seen but one man whose mother she would be willing to be? And you said you felt so about me? I was very proud of it then, but I am prouder of it now, since, feeling so, you cannot be unwilling to be the mother of my children. You are not, are you?"

She nestled a little closer to him, and put her hand about his neck.

He stooped and kissed it, and repeated his question.

"Unwilling? No; how could I be? I never dreaded maternity except when--and that lasted such a little while. I do not dread it now. It seems to me it would be a blessed thing for us. But, Adam, Adam, tell me, for I have sat here all day asking myself, whether it is a blessed thing to be born, or a penalty that others pay."

"I think it would be a blessing to be your son," he said steadily.

"And I think it would be a benediction to be yours," she answered; "but he would not be yours nor mine, but ours, plus everything in the past, verily heir of all the ages, and the ages were full of pain and sorrow. Oh," she said pa.s.sionately, "could you and I who love him so, this son who is only our wish, could you and I who know the weight of this weary world, bind it upon the shoulders of our baby boy, and send him staggering down the centuries, the new Atlas of this old earth?"

They sat in silence for a long time. Then Adam said slowly, "I don't know, dearest; but I do know that you are tired and hungry, and I am going to take you home."

They rose and disappeared through the gateway together.

XVII

Love gives us a sort of religion of our own; we respect another life in ourselves.

BALZAC.

Robin was sh.e.l.ling peas. Adam was reading her the story of their deluge. He paused, dissatisfied, and said impatiently,--

"I have not described it at all. I have said all I had to say in less than a thousand words; one would think such a scene deserved a hundred thousand."

Robin smiled her little inscrutable smile. "I think you have done it very well. It isn't intended to be scientific. You haven't told all the strata that were turned skyward for a moment when that creva.s.se opened between us and the town. You will find, if you turn to the first chapter of Genesis, that there is very little detail; but I am sure that the one line, 'He made the stars also,' is as eloquent as a treatise on the nebular theory. If you were learned in geology and astronomy and so on, you would load it down with an avalanche of scientific hypotheses, about which you would really know nothing, except by deduction, and over which future scientists would wrangle, part of them making you a G.o.d, and the rest proving you a fool. Be content to 'climb where Moses stood,' and produce literature."

"'Why should an author fret about The judgment of posterity?

It is not, and it never was, And it, perhaps, may never be,'"

quoted Adam, cynically. "I wonder what they will call us, Robin, and who will lecture on my mistakes in seven or eight thousand years, and show how it never could have happened. Do you suppose there is any one else on earth? Did the Atlantis people leave any literature behind them?"

Robin shook her head. "Who really knows? G.o.d has not left Himself without a witness, at any time. In some way the story of creation has gone on and on. Every nation has its Eden and flood and Saviour.

Esther was the first, I think, to have her wish granted 'even to the half of my kingdom,' and all the fairy stories since have borrowed the phrase. Cinderella is almost as old as Job; and the Irish, the Fenians, claim that Cadmus, the Phoenician, was one of their forebears. Wide as race distinctions were, there were strange and almost unaccountable similarities."

She went indoors to see to her baking, and coming back went on with her work. Adam watched her silently for awhile, and then said curiously, "I wonder what you have missed most this year?"