As she uttered these words in a tone of indescribable sadness, a faint smile played around the corners of her mouth--such a marble smile as might have appeared upon the face of Niobe. In an instant more it had composed itself into its former sadness, as a sheet of pure water resumes its calmness, after having been lightly stirred by a summer wind.
So long did she stand regarding him with looks of unutterable love that he could not endure the strain of the withheld secret, but exclaimed hoa.r.s.ely: "Go on! Mother, for G.o.d"s sake, go on! If thee has something to disclose, reveal it at once!"
It seemed impossible for her to speak. The opening of the secrets of her heart to G.o.d before the bar of judgment could have cost her no greater effort than this confession to her son.
"David," she said, in a voice that sounded like an echo of a long-dead past, "the fear that the sins of thy parents should be visited upon thee has tormented every hour of my life. I have watched thee and prayed for thee as no one but a mother who has drunk the bitter cup to its dregs could ever do. I have trembled at every childish sin. In every little fault I have beheld a miniature of the vices of thy mother and thy father--thy father! Oh! David, my son--my son!"
The white lips parted, but no sound issued from them. She raised her white hand and clutched at her throat as if choking. Then she trembled, gasped, reeled, and fell forward into his arms.
In a moment more, the agitated heart had ceased to beat, and the secret of her life was hidden in its mysterious silence. The sudden, inexplicable and calamitous nature of this event came near unsettling the mental balance of the sensitive and highly organized youth. Coming as it did upon the very heels of the experiences which had so thoroughly shaken his faith in the old life, he felt himself to be the target for every arrow in the quiver of misfortune.
He seemed to himself not so much like a boat that had sprung a single leak, as like one out of which every nail had been pulled and the joints left open to the inrushing waters.
Into the unfilled gap in his mother"s narrative, ten thousand suspicions crept, each displacing the other and leaving him more and more in darkness and in dread with regard to the origin of his own life.
Wherever he went and whatever he did these confused suspicions resounded in his ears like the murmur in a seash.e.l.l.
He did not dare communicate this story even to his sister; for if she knew nothing he feared to poison her existence by telling her, and if she knew all he had not the courage to listen to the sequel. Perhaps no other experience in life produces a more profound shock than a discovery like that upon which David had so suddenly stumbled. It leads to despair or to melancholy, and many a life of highest promise has been suddenly wrecked by it. While he brooded over this mystery the days slipped past the young mystic almost unnoted; he wandered about the farm, pa.s.sing from one fit of abstraction into another, doing nothing, saying nothing, thinking everything.
The world was shrouded in a gloom through whose shifting mists a single star shone now and then, emitting a brilliant and dazzling ray. It was the figure of a gypsy.
In his heavy, aching heart thoughts of her alone aroused an emotion of joy. As other objects lost their power to attract or charm, she more and more filled all his horizon.
Her name was whispered by each pa.s.sing breeze. It was syllabled by every singing bird. The old clock ticked it on the stairway. The hoofs of his horse which he rode recklessly over the country uttered it to the hard roads on which they fell--"Pepeeta, Pepeeta, Pepeeta."
Whenever he really tried to banish the temptations which haunted his soul, they always returned to the swept and garnished chamber bringing with them seven spirits worse than themselves.
He tried to look forward to the future with hope. But how can a man hope for harvests, when all his seed corn has been destroyed? If his father was bad, what hope was there that he could be better?
He made innumerable resolves to take up the duties of life where he had laid them down, but they were all like birds which die in the nest where they are born.
Pepeeta was drawing him irresistibly to herself; he was like a man in the outer circle of a vortex, of which she was the center. The touch of her soft hand which he could still feel, the farewell glance of eyes which still glowed before his imagination, attracted him like a powerful magnet. It was true that he did not know where she was; but he felt that he could find her in the uttermost parts of the earth by yielding himself to the impulse which she had awakened in his heart.
"A dark veil of mystery hangs over my past. My present is full of misery and unrest. I will see if the future has any joys in store for me," he said to himself at the close of one of his restless days.
Without so much as a word of farewell, he crept out of the house in the gathering dusk, and started in pursuit of the bright object that floated like a will-o"-the-wisp before his inner eye.
A feeling of exultation and relief seized him as he left the place made dark and dreadful by the memory of that tragic scene through which he had so recently pa.s.sed; the quiet of the evening soothed his perturbed spirits, and the tranquil stars looked down upon him with eyes that twinkled as if in sympathy.
It is an old tradition of the monks, that when the sap begins to run in the vines on sunny slopes, a revolt and discontent thrills in the bottles imprisoned in the darkness of the wine vaults. Such a discontent and fever had been thrilling in David"s veins during these warm spring days, when the whole world had been in a ferment of life, and he had been bottled up in the gloom and narrowness of the little country village; and yielding himself to the emotions that seethed in his breast, he broke all the tender ties of the past and went blindly into the future.
He had been suddenly fascinated by a beautiful woman and bewildered by an unscrupulous man; he had felt the foundations of his religious faith shaken, and discovered that his own life had sprung from an illicit pa.s.sion. These are violent blows, and many a man has gone down before a single one of them. If the blows had been delivered singly at long intervals he might have survived the shock; but following each other in swift succession like great tidal waves they had literally swept him from his moorings.
Such collapses fill us with horror and questioning. How do they come about? Can they be prevented? These are the deepest problems of life, and our psychology is still impotent to solve them. We can detect and measure the dross in metals or the poison in drugs; but we have no solvent that will reduce a complex nature like David"s into its original elements and enable us to differentiate a son"s responsibility from that of his father.
We make bold guesses and confident affirmations as to the comparative influence of heredity and environment. We enter into learned disputations as to the blessing or the bane of an education such as his.
But every such case is still a profound and insoluble mystery. The most comprehensive laws and the most careful generalizations meet with too many exceptions to enable us to form a science. The children of the good are too often bad and the children of the bad too often good to permit us to dogmatize about heredity. We learn as our experience deepens and our horizon widens to regard such collapses with a compa.s.sionate sympathy and a humbled consciousness of our own unfitness to judge and condemn. Whether we create our individuality or only bring it to light--is the question that makes us stumble! But while we move in the midst of uncertainties in this realm, there is another in which we walk in the glare of noonday. We know beyond the peradventure of a doubt that whatever may be the origin of such weakness as that of the young mystic, the results are always inevitable! Nature never asks any questions nor makes any allowances. To her mind, sin is sin! Whatsoever a man sows--that shall he also reap. Whether he yield to evil voluntarily or be driven into it by resistless force; whether he sin because of a self-originating propensity or because his father sinned before him, is all one to those resistless executors of Nature"s law, sickness, sorrow, disaster, death!
No man ever defeated Nature! No man ever will! From the instant when he turned his back upon his home, David"s fate was sealed. He was playing against a certainty and he knew it. But he ought to have remembered it!
It was of this that he ought to have been thinking, and not of the gypsy"s eyes!
Sometimes such men escape from the final catastrophe of the long series; but not from the intermediate lashings!
This brutal, idiotic step of Corson"s looks like a final plunge; a fatal fall; a hopeless retrogression. But we must not judge prematurely. "Man advances; but in spiral lines," said Goethe. The river goes forward, in spite of its eddies. You can complete a geometric circle from a minute portion of its curve; but not a human cycle. We can not predict the final issue of a human life until the last sigh is drawn.
CHAPTER XI.
THE FLESH AND THE DEVIL
"To tell men they cannot help themselves is to fling them into recklessness and despair."--Froude.
Although David did not know the exact route the quack had laid out for his journey, he was certain that it would be easy enough to trace him in that spa.r.s.ely-settled region, and so he turned his face in the direction in which the equipage vanished when he watched it from the barn. His movements did not seem to come from his own volition but to originate in something external. He had a sense of yielding to necessity. There are heroic moments in our lives, when that subtle force we call our "will"
demonstrates, or at all events persuades us, that we are "_free_." There are others, like those through which the young adventurer was now pa.s.sing, when we experience a feeling of utter helplessness amidst cosmic forces and believe ourselves to be straws in a mighty wind or ill-fated stars borne along a predestined orbit.
Surrendering himself to the current of events, the recalcitrant Quaker escaped for a time the painful consciousness of personal responsibility.
The tranquil stars above him seemed to look down upon the wanderer in silent approval. The night birds chanted their congratulations from the tree tops, and reading his own thoughts into their songs he imagined he heard them saying, "Let each one find his mate; let each one find his mate."
The cool night breeze caressed and kissed him as it hurried by on silent wings, and for an hour or two he tramped along with a peace in his heart which seemed to be a reflection from the outside world.
But gradually a change came over the face of nature, and this, too, reflected itself in the mirror of his soul.
In the heavens above him the clouds commenced to gather like hostile armies. They skirmished, sent out their flying battalions and then fell upon each other in irresistible fury. Great, jagged flashes of lightning, like sword thrusts from gigantic and hidden hands rent the sky; wild crashes of thunder pealed through the reverberating dome of heaven; the rain fell in torrents; the elements of nature seemed to have evaded their master, vaulted their barriers and precipitated themselves in a furious struggle.
The lonely pilgrim perceived the resemblance which his conflicting emotions bore to this wild scene, and smiled grimly. He found in all this tumult a justification for the tempest in his soul.
It was not until the light of morning struggled through this universal gloom, that the weary and bedraggled traveler entered the outskirts of the then straggling but growing and busy village of Hamilton. Tired in body and benumbed in mind, he made his way to the hotel, conscious only of his desire and determination to look once more upon the face of the woman whose image was so indelibly impressed upon his mind.
Approaching the desk he nervously asked if the doctor was among the guests, flushed at the answer, demanded a room, ascended the steep staircase, and was soon in bed and asleep. Fatigued by his long tramp, he did not awaken until after noon, and then, having bathed, dressed and broken his long fast, he knocked at the door of the room occupied by the doctor and his wife.
There was a quick but gentle step in answer to his summons, and at the music of that footfall his heart beat tumultuously. The door opened, and before him stood the woman who had brought about this mysterious train of events in his life.
She started back as she saw him, with an involuntary and timid motion, but so great was her surprise and joy that she could not control her speech or action sufficiently to greet him.
"Who is there?" cried the doctor, in his loud, imperative voice.
"Mr. Corson," she answered in tones that were scarcely audible.
"Corson? Who the d-d-deuce is Corson, and what the deuce does he want?"
he asked, rising and approaching the door.
The instant his eyes fell on the countenance of the Quaker, he threw up both hands and uttered a prolonged whistle of astonishment.
"The preacher!" he exclaimed. "The lost is found. The p-p-prodigal has returned. Come in, and let us k-k-kill the fatted calf!"