St. Elmo Part 16

Lighting a candle, she lifted the heavy Targum, and slowly approached the suite of rooms, which she was now in the habit of visiting almost daily.

Earlier in the day she had bolted the door, but left the key in the lock, expecting to bring the Targum back as soon as she had shown Mr. Leigh the controverted pa.s.sage. Now, as she crossed the rotunda, an unexpected sound, as of a chair sliding on the marble floor, seemed to issue from the inner room, and she paused to listen. Under the flare of the candle the vindictive face of Siva, and the hooded viper twined about his arm, looked more hideous than ever, warning her not to approach, yet all was silent, save the tinkling of a bell far down in the park, where the sheep cl.u.s.tered under the cedars.

Opening the door, which was ajar, she entered, held the light high over her head, and peered a little nervously around the room; but, here, too, all was quiet as the grave, and quite as dreary, and the only moving thing seemed her shadow, that flitted slightly as the candle-light flickered over the cold, gleaming white tiles. The carpets and curtains--even the rich silk hangings of the arch--were all packed away, and Edna s.h.i.+vered as she looked through both rooms, satisfied herself that she had mistaken the source of the sound, and opened the box where the MSS. were kept.

At sight of them her mind reverted to the theme she had been investigating, and happening to remember the importance attached by ethnologists to the early Coptic inscriptions, she took from the book-shelves a volume containing copies of many of these characters, and drawings of the triumphal processions carved on granite, and representing the captives of various nations torn from their homes to swell the pompous retinue of some barbaric Rhamses or Sesostris.

Drifting back over the gray, waveless, tideless sea of centuries, she stood, in imagination, upon the steps of the Serapeum at Memphis; and when the wild chant of the priests had died away under the huge propylaeum, she listened to the sighing of the tamarinds and ca.s.sias, and the low babble of the sacred Nile, as it rocked the lotus-leaves, under the glowing purple sky, whence a full moon flooded the ancient city with light, and kindled like a beacon the vast placid face of the Sphinx--rising solemn and lonely and weird from its desert lair--and staring blankly, hopelessly across arid yellow sands at the dim colossi of old Misraim.

Following the sinuous stream of Coptic civilization to its inexplicable source in the date-groves of Meroe, the girl's thoughts were borne away to the Golden Fountain of the Sun, where Ammon's black doves fluttered and cooed over the s.h.i.+ning altars and amid the mystic symbols of the marvelous friezes.

As Edna bent over the drawings in the book, oblivious for a time of everything else, she suddenly became aware of the presence of some one in the room, for though perfect stillness reigned, there was a consciousness of companions.h.i.+p, of the proximity of some human being, and with a start she looked up, expecting to meet a pair of eyes fastened upon her. But no living thing confronted her--the tall, bent figure of the Cimbri Prophetess gleamed ghostly white upon the wall, and the bright blue augurous eyes seemed to count the dripping blood-drops; and the unbroken, solemn silence of night brooded over all things, hus.h.i.+ng even the chime of sheep-bells, that had died away among the elm arches. Knowing that no superst.i.tious terrors had ever seized her heretofore, the young student rose, took up the candle, and proceeded to search the two rooms, but as unsuccessfully as before.

"There certainly is somebody here, but I can not find out where."

These words were uttered aloud, and the echo of her own voice seemed sepulchral; then the chill silence again fell upon her. She smiled at her own folly, and thought her imagination had been unduly excited by the pictures she had been examining, and that the nervous s.h.i.+ver that crept over her was the result of the cold. Just then the candle-light flashed over the black marble statuette, grinning horribly as it kept guard over the Taj Mahal. Edna walked up to it, placed the candle on the slab that supported the tomb, and, stooping, scrutinized the lock. A spider had ensconced himself in the golden receptacle, and spun a fine web across the front of the temple, and Edna swept the airy drapery away, and tried to drive the little weaver from his den; but he shrank further and further, and finally she took the key from her pocket and put it far enough into the opening to eject the intruder, who slung himself down one of the silken threads, and crawled sullenly out of sight. Withdrawing the key, she toyed with it, and glanced curiously at the mausoleum.

Taking her handkerchief, she carefully brushed off the cobwebs that festooned the minarets, and murmured that fragment of Persian poetry which she once heard the absent master repeat to his mother, and which she had found, only a few days before, quoted by an Eastern traveller: "The spider hath woven his web in the imperial palaces; and the own hath sung her watch-song on the towers of Afrasiab."

"It is exactly four years to-night since Mr. Murray gave me this key, but he charged me not to open the Taj unless I had reason to believe that he was dead. His letter states that he is alive and well; consequently, the time has not come for me to unseal the mystery. It is strange that he trusted me with this secret; strange that he, who doubts all of his race, could trust a child of whom he really knew so little. Certainly it must have been a singular freak which gave this affair into my keeping, but at least I will not betray the confidence he reposed in me. With the contents of that vault I can have no concern, and yet I wish the key was safely back in his hands. It annoys me to conceal it, and I feel all the while as if I were deceiving his mother."

These words were uttered half unconsciously as she fingered the key, and for a few seconds she stood there, thinking of the master of the house, wondering what luckless influence had so early blackened and distorted his life, and whether he would probably return to Le Bocage before she left it to go out and carve her fortune in the world's noisy quarry. The light danced over her countenance and form, showing the rich folds of her crimson merino dress, with the gossamer lace surrounding her white throat and dimpled wrists; and it seemed to linger caressingly on the s.h.i.+ning ma.s.s of black hair, on the beautiful, polished forehead, the firm, delicate, scarlet lips, and made the large eyes look elfish under their heavy jet lashes.

Again the girl started and glanced over her shoulder, impressed with the same tantalizing conviction of a human presence; of some powerful influence which baffled a.n.a.lysis. s.n.a.t.c.hing the candle, she put the gold key in her pocket, and turned to leave the room, but stopped, for this time an unmistakable sound like the s.h.i.+vering of a gla.s.s or the snapping of a musical string, fell on her strained ears. She could trace it to no particular spot, and conjectured that perhaps a mouse had taken up his abode somewhere in the room, and, frightened by her presence, had run against some of the numerous gla.s.s and china ornaments on the etagere, jostling them until they jingled. Replacing the book which she had taken from the shelves, and fastening the box that contained the MSS., she examined the cabinets, found them securely closed, and then hurried out of the room, locked the door, took the key, and went to her own apartment with nerves more unsettled than she felt disposed to confess.

For some time after she laid her head on her pillow, she racked her brain for an explanation of the singular sensation she had experienced, and at last, annoyed by her restlessness and silly superst.i.tion, she was just sinking into dreams of Ammon and Serapis, when the fierce barking of Ali caused her to start up in terror. The dog seemed almost wild, running frantically to and fro, howling and whining; but finally the sounds receded, gradually quiet was restored, and Edna fell asleep soon after the scream of the locomotive and the rumble of the cars told her that the four o'clock train had just started to Chattanooga.

Modern zoologic science explodes the popular fallacy that chameleons a.s.sume, and reflect at will, the color of the substance on which they rest or feed; but, with a profound salaam to savants, it is respectfully submitted that the mental saurian--human thought-- certainly takes its changing hues, day by day, from the books through which it crawls devouringly.

Is there not ground for plausible doubt that, if the work-bench of Mezzofanti had not stood just beneath the teacher's window, whence the ears of the young carpenter were regaled from morning till night with the rudiments of Latin and Greek, he would never have forsworn planing for parsing, mastered forty dialects, proved a walking scarlet-capped polygot, and attained the distinction of an honorary nomination for the office of interpreter-general at the Tower of Babel?

The h.o.a.ry a.s.sociations and typical significance of the numerous relics that crowded Mr. Murray's rooms seized upon Edna's fancy, linked her sympathies with the huge pantheistic systems of the Orient, and filled her mind with waifs from the dusky realm of a mythology that seemed to antedate all the authentic chronological computations of man. To the East, the mighty alma mater of the human races--of letters, religions, arts, and politics, her thoughts wandered in wondering awe; and Belzoni, Burckhardt, Layard, and Champollion were hierophants of whose teachings she never wearied.

As day by day she yielded more and more to this fascinating nepenthe influence, and bent over the granite sarcophagus in one corner of Mr. Murray's museum, where lay a shrunken mummy shrouded in gilded byssus, the wish strengthened to understand the symbols in which subtle Egyptian priests masked their theogony.

While morning and afternoon hours were given to those branches of study in which Mr. Hammond guided her, she generally spent the evening in Mr. Murray's sitting-room, and sometimes the clock in the rotunda struck midnight before she locked up the MSS. and illuminated papyri.

Two nights after the examination of the Targum, she was seated near the book-case looking over the plates in that rare but very valuable volume, Spence's Polymetis, when the idea flashed across her mind that a rigid a.n.a.lysis and comparison of all the mythologies of the world would throw some light on the problem of ethnology, and in conjunction with philology settle the vexed question.

Pus.h.i.+ng the Polymetis aside, she sprang up and paced the long room, and gradually her eyes kindled, her cheeks burned, as ambition pointed to a possible future, of which, till this hour, she had not dared to dream; and hope, o'erleaping all barriers, grasped a victory that would make her name imperishable.

In her miscellaneous reading she had stumbled upon singular correspondences in the customs and religions of nations separated by surging oceans and by ages; nations whose aboriginal records appeared to prove them distinct, and certainly furnished no hint of an ethnological bridge over which traditions traveled and symbolisms crept in satin sandals. During the past week several of these coincidences had attracted her attention.

The Druidic rites and the festival of Beltein in Scotland and Ireland, she found traced to their source in the wors.h.i.+p of Phrygian Baal. The figure of the Scandinavian Disa, at Upsal, enveloped in a net precisely like that which surrounds some statues of Isis in Egypt. The man of rush sails used by the Peruvians on Lake t.i.ticaca, and their mode of handling them, p.r.o.nounced identical with that which is seen upon the sepulchre of Ramses III. at Thebes. The head of a Mexican priestess ornamented with a veil similar to that carved on Eastern sphinxes, while the robes resembled those of a Jewish high-priest. A very quaint and puzzling pictorial chart of the chronology of the Aztecs contained an image of c.o.xc.o.x in his ark, surrounded by rushes similar to those that overshadowed Moses, and also a likeness of a dove distributing tongues to those born after the deluge.

Now, the thought of carefully gathering up these vague mythologic links, and establis.h.i.+ng a chain of unity that would girdle the world, seized and mastered her, as if veritably clothed with all the power of a bath kol.

To firmly grasp the Bible for a talisman, as Ulysses did the sprig of moly, and to stand in the Pantheon of the universe, examining every shattered idol and crumbling, denied altar, where wors.h.i.+pping humanity had bowed; to tear the veil from oracles and sibyls, and show the world that the true, good and beautiful of all theogonies and cosmogonies, of every system of religion that had waxed and waned since the gray dawn of time, could be traced to Moses and to Jesus, seemed to her a mission grander far than the conquest of empires, and infinitely more to be desired than the crown and heritage of Solomon.

The night wore on as she planned the work of coming years, but she still walked up and down the floor, with slow, uncertain steps, like one who, peering at distant objects, sees nothing close at hand.

Flush and tremor pa.s.sed from her countenance, leaving the features pale and fixed; for the first gush of enthusiasm, like the jets of violet flame flickering over the simmering ma.s.s in alchemic crucibles, had vanished--the thought was a crystalized and consecrated purpose.

At last, when the feeble light admonished her that she would soon be in darkness, she retreated to her own room, and the first glimmer of day struggled in at her window as she knelt at her bedside praying:

"Be pleased, O Lord! to make me a fit instrument for Thy work; sanctify my heart; quicken and enlighten my mind; grant me patience and perseverance and unwavering faith; guide me into paths that lead to truth; enable me in all things to labor with an eye single to thy glory, caring less for the applause of the world than for the advancement of the cause of Christ. O my Father and my G.o.d! bless the work on which I am about to enter, crown it with success, accept me as an humble tool for the benefit of my race, and when the days of my earthly pilgrimage are ended, receive my soul into that eternal rest which Thou hast prepared from the foundations of the world, for the sake of Jesus Christ."

CHAPTER XI.

One afternoon about a week after Mr. Leigh's last visit, as Edna returned from the parsonage, where she had been detained beyond the usual time, Mrs. Murray placed in her hand a note from Mrs. Inge, inviting both to dine with her that day, and meet some distinguished friends from a distant State. Mrs. Murray had already completed an elaborate toilet, and desired Edna to lose no time in making the requisite changes in her own dress. The latter took off her hat, laid her books down on a table and said:

"Please offer my excuses to Mrs. Inge. I can not accept the invitation, and hope you will not urge me."

"Nonsense! Let me hear no more such childish stuff, and get ready at once; we shall be too late, I am afraid."

The orphan leaned against the mantelpiece and shook her head.

Mrs. Murray colored angrily and drew herself up haughtily.

"Edna Earl, did you hear what I said?"

"Yes, madam, but this time I cannot obey you. Allow me to give you my reasons, and I am sure you will forgive what may now seem mere obstinacy. On the night of the party given by Mrs. Inge I determined, under no circ.u.mstances, to accept any future invitations to her house, for I overheard a conversation between Mrs. Hill and Mrs. Montgomery which I believe was intended to reach my ears, and consequently wounded and mortified me very much. I was ridiculed and denounced as a 'poor upstart and interloper,' who was being smuggled into society far above my position in life, and p.r.o.nounced an avaricious schemer, intent on thrusting myself upon Mr. Leigh's notice, and ambitious of marrying him for his fortune. They sneered at the idea that we should study Hebrew with Mr. Hammond, and declared it a mere trap to catch Mr. Leigh. Now, Mrs. Murray, you know that I never had such a thought, and the bare mention of a motive so sordid, contemptible, and unwomanly surprised and disgusted me; but I resolved to study Hebrew by myself, and to avoid meeting Mr. Leigh at the parsonage; for if his sister's friends entertain such an opinion of me, I know not what other people, and even Mrs. Inge, may think. Those two ladies added some other things equally unpleasant and untrue, and as I see that they are also invited to dine to-day, it would be very disagreeable for me to meet them in Mr. Leigh's presence."

Mrs. Murray frowned, and her lips curled, as she clasped a diamond bracelet on her arm.

"I have long since ceased to be surprised by any manifestation of Mrs. Montgomery's insolence. She doubtless judges your motives by those of her snub-nosed and excruciatingly fas.h.i.+onable daughter, Maud, who rumor says, is paying most devoted attention to that same fortune of Gordon's. I shall avail myself of the first suitable occasion to suggest to her that it is rather unbecoming in persons whose fathers were convicted of forgery, and hunted out of the State, to lay such stress on the mere poverty of young aspirants for admission into society. I have always noticed that people (women especially) whose lineage is enveloped in a certain twilight haze, const.i.tute themselves guardians of the inviolability of their pretentious cliques, and fly at the throats of those who, they imagine, desire to enter their fas.h.i.+onable set--their 'mutual admiration a.s.sociation.' As for Mrs. Hill, whose parents were positively respectable, even genteel, I expected less nervousness from her on the subject of genealogy, and should have given her credit for more courtesy and less malice; but, poor thing, nature denied her any individuality, and she serves 'her circle' in the same capacity as one of those tin reflectors fastened on locomotives. All that you heard was excessively ill-bred, and in really good society ill-breeding is more iniquitous than ill-nature; but, however annoying, it is beneath your notice, and unworthy of consideration. I would not gratify them by withdrawing from a position which you can so gracefully occupy."

"It is no privation to me to stay at home; on the contrary, I prefer it, for I would not exchange the companions.h.i.+p of the books in this house for all the dinners that ever were given."

"There is no necessity for you to make a recluse of yourself simply because two rude, silly gossips disgrace themselves. You have time enough to read and study, and still go out with me when I consider it advisable."

"But, my dear Mrs. Murray, my position in your family, as an unknown dependent on your charity, subjects me to--"

"Is a matter which does not concern Mesdames Hill and Montgomery, as I shall most unequivocally intimate to them. I insist upon the dismissal of the whole affair from your mind. How much longer do you intend to keep me waiting?"

"I am very sorry you cannot view the subject from my standpoint, but hereafter I cannot accompany you to dinners and parties. Whenever you desire me to see company in your own house, I shall be glad to comply with your wishes and commands; but my self-respect will not permit me to go out to meet people who barely tolerate me through fear of offending you. It is exceedingly painful, dear Mrs. Murray, for me to have to appear disrespectful and stubborn toward you, but in this instance I can not comply with your wishes."

They looked at each other steadily, and Mrs. Murray's brow cleared and her lip unbent.

"What do you expect me to tell Mrs. Inge?"

"That I return my thanks for her very kind remembrance, but am closely occupied in preparing myself to teach, and have no time for gayeties."

Mrs. Murray smiled significantly.

"Do you suppose that excuse will satisfy your friend Gordon? He will fly for consolation to the stereotyped smile and delicious flattery of simpering Miss Maud."

"I care not where he flies, provided I am left in peace."