CHAPTER XXX
ADAM EXPLAINS
"We must be on our guard," he said, "or she will again outwit us.
She would befool the very elect!"
"How are we to be on our guard?" I asked.
"Every way," he answered. "She fears, therefore hates her child, and
is in this house on her way to destroy her. The birth of children
is in her eyes the death of their parents, and every new generation
the enemy of the last. Her daughter appears to her an open channel
through which her immortality--which yet she counts self-inherent--is
flowing fast away: to fill it up, almost from her birth she has
pursued her with an utter enmity. But the result of her machinations
hitherto is, that in the region she claims as her own, has appeared
a colony of children, to which that daughter is heart and head and
sheltering wings. My Eve longed after the child, and would have
been to her as a mother to her first-born, but we were then unfit
to train her: she was carried into the wilderness, and for ages
we knew nothing of her fate. But she was divinely fostered, and
had young angels for her playmates; nor did she ever know care until
she found a baby in the wood, and the mother-heart in her awoke.
One by one she has found many children since, and that heart is not
yet full. Her family is her absorbing charge, and never children
were better mothered. Her authority over them is without appeal,
but it is unknown to herself, and never comes to the surface except
in watchfulness and service. She has forgotten the time when she
lived without them, and thinks she came herself from the wood, the
first of the family.
"You have saved the life of her and their enemy; therefore your life
belongs to her and them. The princess was on her way to destroy
them, but as she crossed that stream, vengeance overtook her, and
she would have died had you not come to her aid. You did; and ere
now she would have been raging among the Little Ones, had she dared
again cross the stream. But there was yet a way to the blessed
little colony through the world of the three dimensions; only, from
that, by the slaying of her former body, she had excluded herself,
and except in personal contact with one belonging to it, could not
re-enter it. You provided the opportunity: never, in all her long
years, had she had one before. Her hand, with lightest touch, was
on one or other of your muffled feet, every step as you climbed. In
that little chamber, she is now watching to leave it as soon as ever
she may."
"She cannot know anything about the door!--she cannot at least know
how to open it!" I said; but my heart was not so confident as my
words.
"Hush, hush!" whispered the librarian, with uplifted hand; "she can
hear through anything!--You must go at once, and make your way to
my wife's cottage. I will remain to keep guard over her."
"Let me go to the Little Ones!" I cried.
"Beware of that, Mr. Vane. Go to my wife, and do as she tells you."
His advice did not recommend itself: why haste to encounter
measureless delay? If not to protect the children, why go at all?
Alas, even now I believed him only enough to ask him questions,
not to obey him!
"Tell me first, Mr. Raven," I said, "why, of all places, you have
shut her up there! The night I ran from your house, it was
immediately into that closet!"
"The closet is no nearer our cottage, and no farther from it, than
any or every other place."
"But," I returned, hard to persuade where I could not understand,
"how is it then that, when you please, you take from that same door
a whole book where I saw and felt only a part of one? The other
part, you have just told me, stuck through into your library: when
you put it again on the shelf, will it not again stick through into
that? Must not then the two places, in which parts of the same
volume can at the same moment exist, lie close together? Or can
one part of the book be in space, or SOMEWHERE, and the other out
of space, or NOWHERE?"
"I am sorry I cannot explain the thing to you," he answered; "but
there is no provision in you for understanding it. Not merely,
therefore, is the phenomenon inexplicable to you, but the very nature
of it is inapprehensible by you. Indeed I but partially apprehend
it myself. At the same time you are constantly experiencing things
which you not only do not, but cannot understand. You think you
understand them, but your understanding of them is only your being
used to them, and therefore not surprised at them. You accept them,
not because you understand them, but because you must accept them:
they are there, and have unavoidable relations with you! The fact is,
no man understands anything; when he knows he does not understand,
that is his first tottering step--not toward understanding, but
toward the capability of one day understanding. To such things as
these you are not used, therefore you do not fancy you understand
them. Neither I nor any man can here help you to understand; but
I may, perhaps, help you a little to believe!"
He went to the door of the closet, gave a low whistle, and stood
listening. A moment after, I heard, or seemed to hear, a soft whir
of wings, and, looking up, saw a white dove perch for an instant on
the top of the shelves over the portrait, thence drop to Mr. Raven's
shoulder, and lay her head against his cheek. Only by the motions
of their two heads could I tell that they were talking together;
I heard nothing. Neither had I moved my eyes from them, when
suddenly she was not there, and Mr. Raven came back to his seat.
"Why did you whistle?" I asked. "Surely sound here is not sound
there!"
"You are right," he answered. "I whistled that you might know I
called her. Not the whistle, but what the whistle meant reached
her.--There is not a minute to lose: you must go!"
"I will at once!" I replied, and moved for the door.
"You will sleep to-night at my hostelry!" he said--not as a question,
but in a tone of mild authority.
"My heart is with the children," I replied. "But if you insist----"
"I do insist. You can otherwise effect nothing.--I will go with
you as far as the mirror, and see you off."
He rose. There came a sudden shock in the closet. Apparently the
leopardess had flung herself against the heavy door. I looked at
my companion.
"Come; come!" he said.
Ere we reached the door of the library, a howling yell came after
us, mingled with the noise of claws that scored at the hard oak.
I hesitated, and half turned.
"To think of her lying there alone," I murmured, "--with that
terrible wound!"
"Nothing will ever close that wound," he answered, with a sigh.
"It must eat into her heart! Annihilation itself is no death to
evil. Only good where evil was, is evil dead. An evil thing must
live with its evil until it chooses to be good. That alone is the
slaying of evil."
I held my peace until a sound I did not understand overtook us.
"If she should break loose!" I cried.
"Make haste!" he rejoined. "I shall hurry down the moment you are
gone, and I have disarranged the mirrors."
We ran, and reached the wooden chamber breathless. Mr. Raven seized
the chains and adjusted the hood. Then he set the mirrors in their
proper relation, and came beside me in front of the standing one.
Already I saw the mountain range emerging from the mist.
Between us, wedging us asunder, darted, with the yell of a demon,
the huge bulk of the spotted leopardess. She leaped through the
mirror as through an open window, and settled at once into a low,
even, swift gallop.
I cast a look of dismay at my companion, and sprang through to follow
her. He came after me leisurely.
"You need not run," he called; "you cannot overtake her. This is
our way."
As he spoke he turned in the opposite direction.
"She has more magic at her finger-tips than I care to know!" he
added quietly.
"We must do what we can!" I said, and ran on, but sickening as I
saw her dwindle in the distance, stopped, and went back to him.
"Doubtless we must," he answered. "But my wife has warned Mara,
and she will do her part; you must sleep first: you have given me
your word!"
"Nor do I mean to break it. But surely sleep is not the first thing!
Surely, surely, action takes precedence of repose!"
"A man can do nothing he is not fit to do.--See! did I not tell
you Mara would do her part?"
I looked whither he pointed, and saw a white spot moving at an acute
angle with the line taken by the leopardess.
"There she is!" he cried. "The spotted leopardess is strong, but
the white is stronger!"
"I have seen them fight: the combat did not appear decisive as to
that."
"How should such eyes tell which have never slept? The princess did
not confess herself beaten--that she never does--but she fled! When
she confesses her last hope gone, that it is indeed hard to kick
against the goad, then will her day begin to dawn! Come; come! He
who cannot act must make haste to sleep!"
