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Idolatry - A Romance, a novel by Julian Hawthorne |
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Chapter 23. Balder Tells An Untruth |
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_ CHAPTER XXIII. By way of enheartening himself for what he was to do, Balder kissed the posy of Gnulemah's fragrant footsteps. He kept his eyes down, lest she should see something in them to distract her attention from his story. He must go artfully to work,--gain her assent to the abstract principles before marshalling them against himself. Meanwhile Gnulemah had picked up a gold beetle, and was examining it with a certain grave interest. "I never told you how I came by this ring of Hiero's. It was the night before I first saw you, Gnulemah." "The ring guided you to me!" said she, glancing at his downcast visage. "Perhaps it did!" he muttered, struck by the ingenious superstition; and he eyed the keen diamond half suspiciously. How fiercely the little serpents were struggling for it! "But Hiero--he has lost it, and you will see him no more!" "You are with me!" returns she, shining out at him from beneath her level brows. What should she know of death and parting? Balder still forbore to raise his face. Gnulemah was in a frolicsome humor, the reaction of her foregoing solemnity. But Balder, who deemed this hour the gravest of his life, was taken aback by her unseasonable gayety. Casting about for means to sober her,--an ungracious thing for a lover to do!--he hit upon the gold beetle. "Dead; the poor little beetle! Do you know what death is, Gnulemah?" "It is what makes life. The sun dies every night, to get life for the morning. And trees die when cold comes, so as to smile out in green leaves again,--greener than if there had been no death. So it is with all things." "Not with everything," said Balder, taking her light-heartedness very gravely. "That gold beetle in your hand is dead, and will never live or move again." But at that Gnulemah smiled; and bringing her hand, with the beetle in it, near her perfect lips, she lent it a full warm breath,--enough to have enlivened an Egyptian scarabaeus,--and behold! the beetle spread its wings and whizzed away. Before Balder could recover from this unexpected refutation, the lovely witch followed up her advantage. "You thought, perhaps, that Hiero was as dead as the little beetle; but he lives more beautifully in you!" He looked startled up, his large eyes glittering blackly in the paleness of his face. Gnulemah, with the serenity of a victorious disputant willing to make allowances, continued,-- "It may be different in the outside world from which you come; but here death ends nothing, but makes life new and strong." After a silence of some duration, poor Balder renewed his attack from another quarter. "What would you think of one who put to death a creature you loved?" She smiled, and shook her glowing pendants. "Only God puts to death; and no one would hurt a thing I love!" "What should you think of one who put to death a man?" Gnulemah looked for a moment perplexed and indignant. Then, to Balder's great discomfiture, she laughed like a bird-chorus. "Why do you imagine what cannot be? Would you and Hiero kill each other? The gray owl kills little mice, but that is to eat them. Would you eat Hiero--" "Don't laugh, Gnulemah!" besought he. "I should kill him, not as animals kill one another, but from rage and hatred." "Hatred!" repeated Gnulemah, dislikingly; "hatred,--what is it?" "A passion of men's hearts,--the wish that evil may befall others. When the hatred is bitter enough, and the opportunity fair, they kill!" Gnulemah shuddered slightly and looked sad. Then she leaned towards Balder and touched his shoulder persuasively. "Never think of such things, or talk of them! Could you hate anyone, Balder? or kill him if you did?" With that glorious presence so near him,--her voice so close to his ear,--how could he answer her? His heart awoke, and beat and drove the tingling blood tumultuously forth to the remotest veins. She saw the flush, and caught the passionate brilliancy of his eyes. Happy and afraid, she drew back, saying in haste,-- "You have not told me yet about the ring!" That was not wisely said! Balder checked himself with a sudden, strong hand, and held still,--his brows lowered down and his lips settled together,--until his pulses were quiet and his cheeks once more pale. "I will tell you," he said; "but to understand, you must first hear some other things." He hesitated, face to face with an analysis of murder. The position was at once stimulating and appalling. To dissect and reduce to its elements that grisly murder-devil which had once possessed his own soul, and whose writhings beneath the scalpel he would therefore feel as his own--here loomed a prospect large and terrible! Nevertheless, Balder took up the knife. The white petal of an apple-blossom, part from its calyx, came floating earthwards; but a breeze caught it and wafted it aloft. It sank again, and was again arrested and borne skywards. Finally is disappeared over the cliff-edge. "The weight that made it fall is of the earth," said Balder (both he and Gnulemah had been watching the petal's course). "The breeze that buoyed it up was from heaven, and so it is with man. Were there no heavenly support, he would fall at once, but whether or not, he always tends to fall." Gnulemah objected, "It loves the air better than the earth!" "When man begins to fall, he becomes mad, and thinks he is not falling, but that earth is heaven, to which he is rising. But since earth is not like heaven, infinite, he does not wish others to enjoy it, lest his own pleasure be marred." "How can that be?" said the unwilling Gnulemah. "What can make men so happy on earth as other men?" "Each wants all power for himself," rejoined Balder, his voice growing stern as he pursued his theme. "They want to hurl their fellows out of the world, even to annihilation. Every moment this hatred is let grow in the heart's garden, it spreads and strengthens, till it gains dominion and makes men slaves, and madder than before. Each will be above his rival,--his enemy! he will be absolute master over him. And from that resolve is born murder!" "Why do you tell Gnulemah this?" she asked, lifting her head like a majestic serpent. But she could not stop him now. His voice, measured at first, was now driven by emotion. "Murder comes next; and many a man, had fear or impotence not withheld him, would have done murder a thousand times. But sometimes the demon leaps up and masters impotence and fear. The man is drunk with immeasurable selfishness,--greater than the universe can satisfy; which would fain make one victim after another, till all the human race should be destroyed; and then would it turn against Heaven and God. Save for man's mortal frailty, the population of the world would ever and anon be swept away by some giant murderer. "Wickedness grows faster, the wickeder it is; he who has been wicked once will easily be so again,--the more easily as his crime was great. Even though through all his mortal life he sin no more, yet his drift is thitherward! Only the air of Heaven breathing through his soul after death can make him pure." Balder was speaking out all the gloom and terror which had been silently gathering within him since his fatal night. As he spoke, his mind expanded, and perceived things before unknown. As the reasons for condemnation multiplied, he did but push on the harder, striking at each tender spot in his own armor. And as the day turned fatally against him, his face looked great and heroic, and his voice sounded almost triumphant. Thus far, he had only generalized; now, he was come to his own plight. On several points he had been painfully in doubt: whether he had done the deed in self-defence; whether he had meant to do it; whether it had not been a blind, mad accident, since swollen by fevered imagination into the likeness of wilful crime. But against such doubts arrayed itself the ineffaceable memory of that wild joy which had filled his soul, when he had felt his enemy in his power! Had the man survived, Balder might still have doubted; being dead, doubts were but cowardly sophistry. But during the brief pause he made, came a backward recoil of that impulse which had swept him on. All at once he was cold, and wavered. Gnulemah was sitting with her elbow on her knee, her strange eyes fixed upon him. Had he duly considered what effect all this might have on her? In aiming at his own life, might not the sword pass also through hers? Abruptly to behold sin,--to find in the first man she had learnt to know, the sinner,--to be left this burden on her untried soul,--might this not ruin more than her earthly happiness? Did she still love him, such love could end only in misery; should she hate him who of all men was bound to protect her defencelessness,--that were misery indeed! This misgiving, arresting his hand at the instant of delivering the final blow, almost discouraged the much-tried man. He glanced sullenly toward the edge of the cliff, only a few yards off. A new thought jarred through his nerves! He got up and walked to the brink. Full sixty feet to the bottom. Gnulemah also rose slowly, and stretched herself like a tired child, sending a lazy tension through every noble limb and polished muscle. She sighed with a deep breathing in and out, and pressed her hands against her temples. "I was not made to understand such things. Tell me of what you have done or seen--I shall understand that. The things my love does not enter only trouble me and make me sad." As she spoke, she turned away towards the house. She saw, or thought she saw, a man's figure stealing cautiously behind a clump of bushes near the north-eastern corner. Her listlessness fell from, her like a mantle, and she watched, motionless! Her last words had goaded Balder past bearing. As she turned away, his face looked grim and forlorn. He balanced with half-raised arms on the cliff's brink. The river slumbered bluely on below, peace was aloft in the sky, and joy in the trees and grass. But in the man were darkness and despair and loathing of his God-given life! The thing he meditated was not to be, however. Close in shore a little boat glided into view, beating up against stream. In the stern, the sheet in one hand and the tiller in the other, sat Balder's old friend Charon. He nodded up at the young man with a recognizing grin. Then he laid his tiller-hand aside his brown cheek and sang out,-- "Look out there, Capt'n! Davy Jones's got back,--run foul of you!" The next moment he put down the helm and ran out. Meantime Balder, coloring from shame, had stepped back from his dangerous position; and the peril was past. But the paltering irresolution which he had at all points displayed urged him to redeem himself,--else was he lower than a criminal. He went towards Gnulemah,--knelt down,--caught her dress,--he knew not what he did! In a blind dance of sentences he told her that he was a murderer, that all he had said pointed at himself, that with his own hands he had killed Hiero, whose body now lay at the bottom of the sea; many frantic words he spoke. Thus, without art or rhetoric, roughly dragged forth by head and ears, came his momentous confession into the world. Gnulemah had more than once striven to check it, but in vain. When he had come to an end, and stood tense and quivering as a bowstring whose arrow has just flown, these words reached him:-- "Hiero is not dead; he is there behind the trees." Stiffly he turned and stared bewildered. Landscape, sky, Gnulemah, swam before his eyes in fragments, like images in troubled water. She put out her arm and tenderly supported him. "Where?" said he at length. "Near the house,--there!" she pointed. Balder began to walk forward doubtfully. But, suddenly realizing what lay before him, clearness and vigor ebbed back. He saw a figure turn the corner of the house. Then he leapt out and ran like a stag-hound! _ |
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