“What did you expect me to say?”
“That superstition is belief.”
“I am not a heathen,” observed Keyork sanctimoniously.
“Far from it,” laughed Unorna. “I have heard that devils believe and tremble.”
“And you class me with those interesting things, my dear friend?”
“Sometimes: when I am angry with you.”
“Two or three times a day, then? Not more than that?” inquired the sage, swinging his heels, and staring at the rows of skulls in the background.
“Whenever we quarrel. It is easy for you to count the occasions.”
“Easy, but endless. Seriously, Unorna, I am not the devil. I can prove it to you conclusively on theological grounds.”
“Can you? They say that his majesty is a lawyer, and a successful one, in good practice.”
“What caused Satan’s fall? Pride. Then pride is his chief characteristic. Am I proud, Unorna? The question is absurd, I have nothing to be proud of — a little old man with a gray beard, of whom nobody ever heard anything remarkable. No one ever accused me of pride. How could I be proud of anything? Except of your acquaintance, my dear lady,” he added gallantly, laying his hand on his heart, and leaning towards her as he sat.
Unorna laughed at the speech, and threw back her dishevelled hair with a graceful gesture. Keyork paused.
“You are very beautiful,” he said thoughtfully, gazing at her face and at the red gold lights that played in the tangled tresses.
“Worse and worse!” she exclaimed, still laughing. “Are you going to repeat the comedy you played so well this afternoon, and make love to me again?”
“If you like. But I do not need to win your affections now.”
“Why not?”
“Have I not bought your soul, with everything in it, like a furnished house?” he asked merrily.
“Then you are the devil after all?”
“Or an angel. Why should the evil one have a monopoly in the soul-market? But you remind me of my argument. You would have distracted Demosthenes in the heat of a peroration, or Socrates in the midst of his defence, if you had flashed that hair of yours before their old eyes. You have almost taken the life out of my argument. I was going to say that my peculiarity is not less exclusive than Lucifer’s, though it takes a different turn. I was going to confess with the utmost frankness and the most sincere truth that my only crime against Heaven is a most perfect, unswerving, devotional love for my own particular Self. In that attachment I have never wavered yet — but I really cannot say what may become of Keyork Arabian if he looks at you much longer.”
“He might become a human being,” suggested Unorna.
“How can you be so cruel as to suggest such a horrible possibility?” cried the gnome with a shudder, either real or extremely well feigned.
“You are betraying yourself, Keyork. You must control your feelings better, or I shall find out the truth about you.”
He glanced keenly at her, and was silent for a while. Unorna rose slowly to her feet, and standing beside him, began to twist her hair into a great coil upon her head.
“What made you let it down?” asked Keyork with some curiosity, as he watched her.
“I hardly know,” she answered, still busy with the braids. “I was nervous, I suppose, as you say, and so it got loose and came down.”
“Nervous about our friend?”
She did not reply, but turned from him with a shake of the head and took up her fur mantle.
“You are not going?” said Keyork quietly, in a tone of conviction.
She started slightly, dropped the sable, and sat down again.
“No,” she said, “I am not going yet. I do not know what made me take my cloak.”
“You have really no cause for nervousness now that it is all over,” remarked the sage, who had not descended from his perch on the table. “He is very well. It is one of those cases which are interesting as being new, or at least only partially investigated. We may as well speak in confidence, Unorna, for we really understand each other. Do you not think so?”
“That depends on what you have to say.”
“Not much — nothing that ought to offend you. You must consider, my dear,” he said, assuming an admirably paternal tone, “that I might be your father, and that I have your welfare very much at heart, as well as your happiness. You love this man — no, do not be angry, do not interrupt me. You could not do better for yourself, nor for him. I knew him years ago. He is a grand man — the sort of man I would like to be. Good. You find him suffering from a delusion, or a memory, whichever it be. Not only is this delusion — let us call it so — ruining his happiness and undermining his strength, but so long as it endures, it also completely excludes the possibility of his feeling for you what you feel for him. Your own interest coincides exactly with the promptings of real, human charity. And yours is in reality a charitable nature, dear Unorna, though you are sometimes a little hasty with poor old Keyork. Good again. You, being moved by a desire for this man’s welfare, most kindly and wisely take steps to cure him of his madness. The delusion is strong, but your will is stronger. The delusion yields after a violent struggle during which it has even impressed itself upon your own senses. The patient is brought home, properly cared for, and disposed to rest. Then he wakes, apparently of his own accord, and behold! he is completely cured. Everything has been successful, everything is perfect, everything has followed the usual course of such mental cures by means of hypnosis. The only thing I do not understand is the waking. That is the only thing which makes me uneasy for the future, until I can see it properly explained. He had no right to wake without your suggestion, if he was still in the hypnotic state; and if he had already come out of the hypnotic state by a natural reaction, it is to be feared that the cure may not be permanent.”
Unorna had listened attentively, as she always did when Keyork delivered himself of a serious opinion upon a psychiatric case. Her eyes gleamed with satisfaction as he finished.
“If that is all that troubles you,” she said, “you may set your mind at rest. After he had fallen, and while the watchman was getting the carriage, I repeated my suggestion and ordered him to wake without pain in an hour.”
“Perfect! Splendid!” cried Keyork, clapping his hands loudly together. “I did you an injustice, my dear Unorna. You are not so nervous as I thought, since you forgot nothing. What a woman! Ghost-proof, and able to think connectedly even at such a moment! But tell me, did you not take the opportunity of suggesting something else?” His eyes twinkled merrily, as he asked the question.
“What do you mean?” inquired Unorna, with sudden coldness.
“Oh, nothing so serious as you seem to think. I was only wondering whether a suggestion of reciprocation might not have been wise.”
She faced him fiercely.
“Hold your peace, Keyork Arabian!” she cried.
“Why?” he asked with a bland smile, swinging his little legs and stroking his long beard.
“There is a limit! Must you for ever be trying to suggest, and trying to guide me in everything I do? It is intolerable! I can hardly call my soul my own!”
“Hardly, considering my recent acquisition of it,” returned Keyork calmly.
“That wretched jest is threadbare.”
“A jest! Wretched? And threadbare, too? Poor Keyork! His wit is failing at last.”
He shook his head in mock melancholy over his supposed intellectual dotage. Unorna turned away, this time with the determination to leave him.
“I am sorry if I have offended you,” he said, very meekly. “Was what I said so very unpardonable?”
“If ignorance is unpardonable, as you always say, then your speech is past forgiveness,” said Unorna, relenting by force of habit, but gathering her fur around her. “If you know anything of women—”
“Which I do not,” observed the gnome in a low-toned interruption.
“Which you do not — you would know how
much such love as you advise me to manufacture by force of suggestion could be worth in a woman’s eyes. You would know that a woman will be loved for herself, for her beauty, for her wit, for her virtues, for her faults, for her own love, if you will, and by a man conscious of all his actions and free of his heart; not by a mere patient reduced to the proper state of sentiment by a trick of hypnotism, or psychiatry, or of whatever you choose to call the effect of this power of mine which neither you, nor I, nor any one can explain. I will be loved freely, for myself, or not at all.”
“I see, I see,” said Keyork thoughtfully, “something in the way Israel Kafka loves you.”
“Yes, as Israel Kafka loves me, I am not afraid to say it. As he loves me, of his own free will, and to his own destruction — as I should have loved him, had it been so fated.”
“So you are a fatalist, Unorna,” observed her companion, still stroking and twisting his beard. “It is strange that we should differ upon so many fundamental questions, you and I, and yet be such good friends. Is it not?”
“The strangest thing of all is that I should submit to your exasperating ways as I do.”
“It does not strike me that it is I who am quarrelling this time,” said Keyork.
“I confess, I would almost prefer that to your imperturbable coolness. What is this new phase? You used not to be like this. You are planning some wickedness. I am sure of it.”
“And that is all the credit I get for keeping my temper! Did I not say a while ago that I would never quarrel with you again?”
“You said so, but—”
“But you did not expect me to keep my word,” said Keyork, slipping from his seat on the table with considerable agility and suddenly standing close before her. “And do you not yet know that when I say a thing I do it, and that when I have got a thing I keep it?”
“So far as the latter point is concerned, I have nothing to say. But you need not be so terribly impressive; and unless you are going to break your word, by which you seem to set such store, and quarrel with me, you need not look at me so fiercely.”
Keyork suddenly let his voice drop to its deepest and most vibrating key.
“I only want you to remember this,” he said. “You are not an ordinary woman, as I am not an ordinary man, and the experiment we are making together is an altogether extraordinary one. I have told you the truth. I care for nothing but my individual self, and I seek nothing but the prolongation of life. If you endanger the success of the great trial again, as you did to-day, and if it fails, I will never forgive you. You will make an enemy of me, and you will regret it while you live, and longer than that, perhaps. So long as you keep the compact there is nothing I will not do to help you — nothing within the bounds of your imagination. And I can do much. Do you understand?”
“I understand that you are afraid of losing my help.”
“That is it — of losing your help. I am not afraid of losing you — in the end.”
Unorna smiled rather scornfully at first, as she looked down upon the little man’s strange face and gazed fearlessly into his eyes. But as she looked, the smile faded, and the colour slowly sank from her face, until she was very pale. And as she felt herself losing courage before something which she could not understand, Keyork’s eyes grew brighter and brighter till they glowed like drops of molten metal. A sound as of many voices wailing in agony rose and trembled and quavered in the air. With a wild cry, Unorna pressed her hands to her ears and fled towards the entrance.
“You are very nervous to-night,” observed Keyork, as he opened the door.
Then he went silently down the stairs by her side and helped her into the carriage, which had been waiting since his return.
CHAPTER XI
A MONTH HAD passed since the day on which Unorna had first seen the Wanderer, and since the evening when she had sat so long in conversation with Keyork Arabian. The snow lay heavily on all the rolling moorland about Prague, covering everything up to the very gates of the black city; and within, all things were as hard and dark and frozen as ever. The sun was still the sun, no doubt, high above the mist and the gloom which he had no power to pierce, but no man could say that he had seen him in that month. At long intervals indeed, a faint rose-coloured glow touched the high walls of the Hradschin and transfigured for an instant the short spires of the unfinished cathedral, hundreds of feet above the icebound river and the sepulchral capital; sometimes, in the dim afternoons, a little gold filtered through the heavy air and tinged the snow-steeples of the Teyn Kirche, and yellowed the stately tower of the town hall; but that was all, so far as the moving throngs of silent beings that filled the streets could see. The very air men breathed seemed to be stiffening with damp cold. For that is not the glorious winter of our own dear north, where the whole earth is a jewel of gleaming crystals hung between two heavens, between the heaven of the day, and the heaven of the night, beautiful alike in sunshine and in starlight, under the rays of the moon, at evening and again at dawn; where the pines and hemlocks are as forests of plumes powdered thick with dust of silver; where the black ice rings like a deep-toned bell beneath the heel of the sweeping skate — the ice that you may follow a hundred miles if you have breath and strength; where the harshest voice rings musically among the icicles and the snow-laden boughs; where the quick jingle of sleigh bells far off on the smooth, deep track brings to the listener the vision of our own merry Father Christmas, with snowy beard, and apple cheeks, and peaked fur cap, and mighty gauntlets, and hampers and sacks full of toys and good things and true northern jollity; where all is young and fresh and free; where eyes are bright and cheeks are red, and hands are strong and hearts are brave; where children laugh and tumble in the diamond dust of the dry, driven snow; where men and women know what happiness can mean; where the old are as the giant pines, green, silver-crowned landmarks in the human forest, rather than as dried, twisted, sapless trees fit only to be cut down and burned, in that dear north to which our hearts and memories still turn for refreshment, under the Indian suns, and out of the hot splendour of calm southern seas. The winter of the black city that spans the frozen Moldau is the winter of the grave, dim as a perpetual afternoon in a land where no lotus ever grew, cold with the unspeakable frigidness of a reeking air that thickens as oil but will not be frozen, melancholy as a stony island of death in a lifeless sea.
A month had gone by, and in that time the love that had so suddenly taken root in Unorna’s heart had grown to great proportions as love will when, being strong and real, it is thwarted and repulsed at every turn. For she was not loved. She had destroyed the idol and rooted out the memory of it, but she could not take its place. She had spoken the truth when she had told Keyork that she would be loved for herself, or not at all, and that she would use neither her secret arts nor her rare gifts to manufacture a semblance when she longed for a reality.
Almost daily she saw him. As in a dream he came to her and sat by her side, hour after hour, talking of many things, calm, apparently, and satisfied in her society, but strangely apathetic and indifferent. Never once in those many days had she seen his pale face light up with pleasure, nor his deep eyes show a gleam of interest; never had the tone of his voice been disturbed in its even monotony; never had the touch of his hand, when they met and parted, felt the communication of the thrill that ran through hers.
It was very bitter, for Unorna was proud with the scarcely reasoning pride of a lawless, highly gifted nature, accustomed to be obeyed and little used to bending under any influence. She brought all the skill she could command to her assistance; she talked to him, she told him of herself, she sought his confidence, she consulted him on every matter, she attempted to fascinate his imagination with tales of a life which even he could never have seen; she even sang to him old songs and snatches of wonderful melodies which, in her childhood, had still survived the advancing wave of silence that has overwhelmed the Bohemian people within the memory of living man, bringing a change into the daily life and temperament of a wh
ole nation which is perhaps unparalleled in any history. He listened, he smiled, he showed a faint pleasure and a great understanding in all these things, and he came back day after day to talk and listen again. But that was all. She felt that she could amuse him without charming him.
And Unorna suffered terribly. Her cheek grew thinner and her eyes gleamed with sudden fires. She was restless, and her beautiful hands, from seeming to be carved in white marble, began to look as though they were chiselled out of delicate transparent alabaster. She slept little and thought much, and if she did not shed tears, it was because she was too strong to weep for pain and too proud to weep from anger and disappointment. And yet her resolution remained firm, for it was part and parcel of her inmost self, and was guarded by pride on the one hand and an unalterable belief in fate on the other.
To-day they sat together, as they had so often sat, among the flowers and the trees in the vast conservatory, she in her tall, carved chair and he upon a lower seat before her. They had been silent for some minutes. It was not yet noon, but it might have been early morning in a southern island, so soft was the light, so freshly scented the air, so peaceful the tinkle of the tiny fountain. Unorna’s expression was sad, as she gazed in silence at the man she loved. There was something gone from his face, she thought, since she had first seen him, and it was to bring that something back that she would give her life and her soul if she could.
Suddenly her lips moved and a sad melody trembled in the air. Unorna sang, almost as though singing to herself. The Wanderer’s deep eyes met hers and he listened.
“When in life’s heaviest hour
Grief crowds upon the heart
One wondrous prayer
My memory repeats.
“The harmony of the living words
Is full of strength to heal,
There breathes in them a holy charm
Past understanding.
“Then, as a burden from my soul,
Doubt rolls away,
And I believe — believe in tears,
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 464