THE BEAUTY OF THE WORLD

CHAPTER XV

THE BEAUTY OF THE WORLD

When, once more, the exquisite mystery of spring came upon the world, there was a not less wonderful rebirth in the heart of Ynys.

With the coming of that child upon whom such high hopes had been set—its birth, still and quiet as a snowdrop fallen before an icy wind upon the snow which nurtured it—all the fear of a mysterious Nemesis, because of her union with Alan despite the shadow of tragic crime which made that union ominous of evil destiny; all the vague forebodings which had possessed her ever since she left Kerival; and, at the last, all the mystic elation with which her mind had become a winged and wandering spirit, passed from her.

The gloom of that northern winter was tonic to them both. As soon as her weakness was past, and once more she was able to go about with Alan, her old joyousness returned. In her eyes it was almost as though the islanders shared her recovered happiness. For one thing, they no more avoided her and Alan. With the death of the man who had so long sustained a mysterious existence upon Rona, their superstitious aversion went; they ceased to speak of Am Buchaille BÀn and, whether Donnacha BÀn had found on Rona one of the hidden ways to heaven or had only dallied upon one of the byways to hell, it was commonly held that he had paid his death-eric by his lonely and even appalling life of unredeemed solitude. Now that there was no longer any possibility of confusion between the outcast who had come to his tragic end, among the sea caves of Rona, and his kinsman who bore to him so extraordinary a resemblance, a deep sense of the injustice that had been done to Alan Carmichael prevailed among the islanders. In many ways they showed their regret; but most satisfactorily, so far as Alan was concerned, by taking him as one of themselves; as a man no longer under the shadow of doom or in any way linked to a disastrous fate.

True, there were still some of the isle folk on Borosay and Barra who maintained that the man who had been found in the sea cave, whether Donnacha BÀn or some other, had nothing to do with the mysterious Herdsman, whose advent, indeed, had long been anticipated by a section of the older inhabitants. It was only seven years since Murdo Macphail—better known as Murdo-Bronnach-namhara, Brown Murdoch of the Sea, from his habit of preaching to the islanders from where he stood waist-deep in the water—had prophesied that the Herdsman who was Shepherd of Israel would indeed come again, and that within seven years. And had he not added that if the Fair Lonely One were not accepted of the people, there would be deep sorrow for one and all, and a bitter wrong upon all the isles of the west?

These murmurers now shook their heads and whispered often. Of a truth, they said, the Herdsman was come as foretold, and Alan Carmichael was blind indeed not to see that Ynys, his wife, had received a vision, and, because of her silence, been punished in the death of her first-born.

But with the white growth of winter, the pleasant, familiar intercourse that everywhere prevailed wrought finally against the last threadbare fabric of superstition. Before the glow of the peats the sadness and gloom slowly dissipated. It was a new delight to both Alan and Ynys to find that the islanders could be so genial and almost gay, with a love of laughter and music and grotesque humor which, even in the blithe little fishing haven of Ploumaliou, they had never seen surpassed.

The cold months passed for them in a quiet content. That could not be happiness upon which was the shadow of so much pain; but there was something akin to it in the sweet serenity which came like calm after storm.

Possibly they might have been content to remain in Rona; to find in the island their interest and happiness. Ynys, indeed, often longed to leave the place where she had been so sadly disillusioned; and yet she did not urge that the home at Caisteal-Rhona should be broken up. While they were still in this state of quiet suspense, news came that affected them strangely.

They had had no word from Kerival since they left, but one windy March day a boat from Borosay put into the haven with letters from Alan's agents in Edinburgh. Among them was one from the AbbÉ CÆsar de La BruyÈre, from Kerloek. From this Alan learned strange news.

On the very day that he and Ynys had left Kerival, Annaik had disappeared. None knew where she had gone. At first it was thought that Judik Kerbastiou had something to do with her absence, but two days after she had gone he was again at Kerival. The house was a place of anarchy. No one knew whom to obey; what to do. With the Marquise Lois in her grave, with both Ynys and Annaik mysteriously absent and apparently with no intention to return, and with Tristran the Silent more morosely taciturn than his wont, and more than ever an invalid, with all this it was difficult for those in authority to exact the habitual duties. But in addition to this there were the imperious claims of Judik Kerbastiou, emphasized by his refusal to be addressed by any other name than the Sieur Jud de Kerival.

When, suddenly, and while quietly dictating a letter, the Marquis Tristran died, it seemed at last as though Judik's triumph had come. For a brief while he was even addressed as M. le Marquis. But on the noon following that day he had a rude awakening. A notary from Ploumaliou arrived with the family lawyers, and produced a written and signed confession on the part of the woman whom he had called mother, that he was not her child at all, that her own child was dead, and that Kerbastiou was really a forest foundling. As if this were not enough, the notary also proved, even to the conviction of Judik, that the written marriage testimony from the parish books was an impudent forgery.

So the man who had made so abrupt and dramatic an appearance on the threshold of Kerival had, in the very moment of his triumph, to retreat once more to his obscurity as a homeless woodlander.

The sole heirs now were Annaik and Ynys, but of neither was any thing known. The difficulty was partially solved by the abrupt appearance of Annaik on the day of the second conclave.

For a time thereafter all went well at Kerival. Then rumor began to spread mysterious whispers about the Lady Annaik. She would see none of her neighbors, whether from far or near, and even the Sieur de Morvan and his kith or kin were denied. Then, too, she disappeared for days at a time. Some thought she went to Ploumaliou or Kerloek, some that she had gone as far away as Rennes or St. Brieuc, and a few even imagined the remote Paris to be her goal. None dreamed that she had gone no further than the forest of Kerival.

But as the autumn waned, rumors became more explicit. Strange things were said of Annaik de Kerival. At last the anxious CurÉ of Ploumaliou took it upon himself to assure all who spoke to him about the Lady of Kerival that he had good reason to believe she was privately married. This, at least, drew some of the poison out of the gossip that had arisen.

Then a day came when the Lady Annaik dismissed the servants at Kerival, and left none in the house save an old gardener and his wife. She was going away for a time, she said. She went, and from that day was not seen again.

Then came, in the AbbÉ CÆsar de La BruyÈre's letter, the strangest part of the mystery.

Annaik, ever since the departure of Alan and Ynys, had been living the forest life. All her passionate sylvan and barbaric instincts had been suddenly aroused. For the green woods and the forest ways she suffered an intolerable nostalgia. But over and above this was another reason. It seemed, said the AbbÉ CÆsar, that she must have returned the rude love of Judik Kerbastiou. However this might be, she lived with him for days at a time, and he himself had a copy of their marriage certificate made out at a registrar's in a remote little hill-town in the Montagnes Noires.

This union with the morose and strange Judik Kerbastiou had not been known to any of the peasants until her trouble came to her. When the day was near she did not return to Kerival, but kept to the gypsy tent which she shared with Judik. After the birth of the child, every one knew, and every one marvelled. It was a madness: that was what all said, from Kerloek to Ploumaliou.

But neither the union nor the child brought happiness to these twain, so much at one in their woodland life, so hopelessly alien in all else. One day a man named Iouenn Kerbac'h, passing by the tent where Judik and Annaik had taken shelter from a violent thunder-storm, overheard a savage upbraiding on the part of Kerbastiou. Annaik was his wife, it was true—so he cried—but a wife who had in nothing short of madness renounced every thing, and now would claim nothing of her own nor allow him to claim aught; a wife whom he loved with another madness, and yet hated because she was so hopelessly remote from himself; a wife who had borne a child, but a child that had nothing of the gypsy eyes and swarthy darkness of Judik Kerbastiou, but was fair, and with skin as white and eyes as blue as those of Alan de Kerival.

It was this, and the terrible words that were said, which made Iouenn Kerbac'h hurry onward, dreading to listen further. Yet nothing that he overheard gave him so strange a fear as the laugh with which Annaik de Kerival greeted a savage, screaming threat of death, hurled at her because of her silence after the taunting accusation he had made ... had made, and defied her to refute.

None heard or saw Annaik Kerbastiou after that day, till the night of the evening when Judik came into Haut-Kerloek and went straight to Jehan Rusgol, the Maire.

When asked what he had come for he had replied simply: "The woman Annaik is dead." It was commonly thought that he had killed her, but there was no evidence of this, and the end of the inevitable legal procedure was the acquittal of the woodlander. From that day the man was rarely seen of his fellows, and even then, for the most part, only by charcoal-burners and others who had forest business. A few peasants knew where his hut was, and now and again called to speak with him, or to drink a cup of cider; but oftener than not he was absent, and always with the child. The boy had survived his mother's death, and in some strange way had suddenly become so dear to Judik Kerbastiou that the two were inseparable.

This, then, was the tidings which startled Alan and Ynys out of their remote quiescence.

The unexpected news, coupled with the urgent request that both should return to Kerival, if only for a brief while, so as to prevent the property falling into absolute ruin, came as a whip upon Alan's mind. To all he said Ynys agreed, and was even glad to leave Rona and return to Brittany.

So it was that, with the first days of April, they bade farewell to Ian and his sister, whom they left at Caisteal-Rhona, which was henceforth to be their home, and to all upon the island, and set forth in a fishing smack for Borosay.

It was not till the last of the precipices of Rona was lost to view behind the south headland of Borosay that Ynys clearly realized the deep gladness with which she left the lonely Isle of the Caves. That it would have been impossible for her to live there long she was now well assured; and for Alan, too, the life was not suitable. For the north, and for the islands, they would ever have a deep feeling, almost sacred in its intensity; but all that had happened made living there a thing difficult and painful for them, and moreover each, though Ynys most, missed that green woodland beauty, the ceaseless forest charm, which made the very memory of Kerival so fragrant.

They went away, then, not as travellers who fare far with no thought of return, but rather as pilgrims returning homeward from a shrine sacred to them by profound and intimate associations.

That was, indeed, for them a strange home-going. From the first there was something dreamlike, unreal, about that southward flight; in the long sail across Hebrid seas, calm as glass until the south headlands of Mull were passed, and then storm-swept; in the rapid journey across Scotland and through England; and in the recrossing of that narrow sea which had once seemed to them a gulf of ultimate division.

But when once more they saw the grotesque bulbous spire of Ploumaliou rising above the sand-dunes by which, from St. Malo, they approached the dear, familiar country, all this uncertainty went from them. With light hearts they realized it was indeed true; that they were free at last of a life for which they were now unfitted, and that the lost threads in the maze had been found.

By their own wish the home-coming was so private that none knew of it save the doctor, the CurÉ, the lawyer who accompanied them from Ploumaliou, and the old gardener and his wife. As they neared the chÂteau from the north, Alan and Ynys alighted from the dishevelled carriage which was the sole vehicle of which Ploumaliou could boast. M. Auriol could drive on alone; for themselves, they chose to reach their home by the dunes and scattered pines, and thence by the yew close behind the manor-house.

The day was windless and of a serene beauty. Ever since noon the few clouds, suspensive in the azure flood like islets of snow, had waned till they were faint and light as blown swan's-down, then filmy as vapor lifted against the sun, and at last were no more visible; there had been the same unfathomable depths of azure, through which the tides of light imperceptibly ebbed from the zenith. The sea, too, was of a vivid though motionless blue, save where luminous with a white sheen or wrought with violet shadows and straits of amethyst. Upon the land lay a golden peace. A richer glow involved the dunes, where the pine-shadows cast long, motionless blue shapes. As, hand in hand, Ynys and Alan moved athwart the pine glade whence they could pass at once either westward into the cypress alley or eastward through the yew close, they stopped instinctively. Beyond them rose the chimneys and gables of the House of Kerival, strangely still and remote, for all their familiar look. What a brief while ago it seemed since he and she had walked under these pines, wrought by the first ecstasy of their virginal love. Then, those who now lay quiet in the darkness of the earth were alive; Lois de Kerival, with her repressed, passionate heart still at last; the Marquis Tristran, with the young grass growing soft and green over his bitterness; Alasdair Carmichael, with the echo of the island waves stilled under the quiet bells of the little church which guarded the grave-yard of St. Blaise; and Annaik—poor lost waif of beautiful womanhood, submerged forever in the green woods she loved so well, and sleeping so sound a sleep at last in an unmarked hollow beneath an ancient tree in some obscure glade or alley.

A shadow was in Alan's eyes—a deeper shadow than that caused by thought of the dead who lay heedless and listless, at once so near and such depths away—a deeper shadow than that cast by memory of the crime which overlay the past.

As his eyes wandered to the cypress alley, his heart knew again a pain almost beyond endurance; a pain that only the peace of Rona had translated into a strong acquiescence in the irrevocable past—a pain become less haunting under the stress of all which had happened in connection with the Herdsman, till it knew a bitter resurrection when Alan came to read of the tragic fate of the woman who had loved him.

Through some wayward impulse Ynys abruptly asked him to go with her through the cypress alley, so that they should approach the chÂteau from the forest.

Silently, and with downcast eyes, he walked by her side, his hand still in hers. But his thoughts were with the dead woman, on the bitter hazard of love, and on what lay, forever secret, between Annaik and himself. And as he communed with himself, in an austere pain of remembrance, he came to see more and more clearly that in some strange way the Herdsman episode, with all involved therein, was no arbitrary chance in the maze of life, but a definite working out of destiny. None could ever know what Annaik had foretold, had known, on that terrible night when the silence of the moonlit peace was continuously rent by the savage screams of the peacocks; nor could any other than himself discern, against the dark tapestries of what veiled his inner life, the weaving of an inextricable web.

It was difficult for him to believe that she was dead—Annaik, who had always been so radiantly, superbly alive. Now there was dust upon that wonderful bronze hair; darkness upon those lambent eyes; no swift pulse beating in the red tide in the veins; a frost against the heart. What a burden it had carried, poor heart! "Oh, Annaik, Annaik!" he muttered below his breath, "what a hard wayfaring because of a passion crucified upon the bitter tree of despair; what a fierce, silent, unwavering tyranny over the rebellious voices crying unceasingly from every nerve, or swept this way and that on every stormy tide of blood."

That Annaik who loved the forest so passing well, and in whom the green fire of life flamed consumingly, should no longer be alive to rejoice in the glory of spring, now once again everywhere involving the brown earth and the purple branches, was an almost unrealizable thing. To walk in that cypress alley once more; to cross that open glade with its single hawthorn; to move in the dark green shadow of that yew close; to do this and remember all that Annaik had suffered, and that now she lay quiet and beyond all pain or joy to touch her, was to Alan a thought almost too poignant to be borne.

It was with an effort he answered Ynys when she spoke, and it was in silence that they entered the house which was now their home, and where—years ago, as it seemed—they had been young and happy.

But that night he sat alone for a time in the little room in the tower which rose from the east wing of Kerival—the room he had fitted up as an observatory, similar, on a smaller scale, to that in the Tour de l'Ile where he had so deeply studied the mystery of the starry world. Here he had dreamed many dreams, and here he dreamed yet another.

For out of his thoughts about Annaik and Ynys arose a fuller, a deeper conception of Womanhood. How well he remembered a legend that Ynys had told him on Rona: a legend of a fair spirit which goes to and fro upon the world, the Weaver of Tears. He loves the pathways of sorrow. His voice is low and sweet, with a sound like the bubbling of waters in that fount whence the rainbows rise. His eyes are in quiet places, and in the dumb pain of animals as in the agony of the human brain: but most he is found, oftenest are the dewy traces of his feet, in the heart of woman.

Tears, tears! They are not the saltest tears which are on the lids of those who weep. Fierce tears there are, hot founts of pain in the mind of many a man, that are never shed, but slowly crystallize in furrows on brow and face, and in deep weariness in the eyes; fierce tears, unquenchable, in the heart of many a woman, whose brave eyes look fearlessly at life; whose dauntless courage goes forth daily to die, but never to be vanquished.

In truth the Weaver of Tears abides in the heart of Woman. O Mother of Pity, of Love, of deep Compassion! with thee it is to yearn forever for the ideal human; to bring the spiritual love into fusion with human desire; endlessly to strive, endlessly to fail; always to hope in spite of disillusion; to love unswervingly against all baffling and misunderstanding, and even forgetfulness! O Woman, whose eyes are always stretched out to her erring children, whose heart is big enough to cover all the little children in the world, and suffer with their sufferings, and joy with their joys! Woman, whose other divine names are Strength and Patience, who is no girl, no Virgin, because she has drunk too deeply of the fount of Life to be very young or very joyful. Upon her lips is the shadowy kiss of death; in her eyes is the shadow of birth. She is the veiled interpreter of the two mysteries. Yet what joyousness like hers, when she wills; because of her unwavering hope, her inexhaustible fount of love?

So it was that, just as Alan had long recognized as a deep truth how the spiritual nature of man has been revealed to humanity in many divine incarnations, so he had come to believe that the spiritual nature of woman has been revealed in the many Marys, sisters of the Beloved, who have had the keys of the soul and the heart in their unconscious keeping. In this exquisite truth he knew a fresh and vivid hope. Was it all a dream that Ynys had dreamed, far away among the sea arcades of Rona? Had the Herdsman, the Shepherd of Souls, indeed revealed to her that a child was to be born who would be one of the redeemers of the world? A Woman Saviour, who would come near to all of us, because in her heart would be the blind tears of the child, and the bitter tears of the man, and the patient tears of the woman; who would be the Compassionate One, with no end or aim but compassion—with no doctrine to teach, no way to show, but only deep, wonderful, beautiful, inalienable, unquenchable compassion?

For, in truth, there is the divine, eternal feminine counterpart to the divine, eternal male, and both are needed to explain the mystery of the dual Spirit within us—the mystery of the Two in One, so infinitely stranger and more wonderful than that triune life which the blind teachers of the blind have made a rock of stumbling and offence out of a truth clear and obvious as noon.

We speak of Mother Nature, but we do not discern the living truth behind our words. How few of us have the vision of this great brooding Mother, whose garment is the earth and sea, whose head is pillowed among the stars; she who, with Death and Sleep as her familiar shapes, soothes and rests all the weariness of the world, from the waning leaf to the beating pulse; from the brief span of a human heart to the furrowing of granite brows by the uninterrupted sun, the hounds of rain and wind, and the untrammelled airs of heaven.

Not cruel, relentless, impotently anarchic, chaotically potent, this Mater Genetrix. We see her thus, who are flying threads in the loom she weaves. But she is patient, abiding, certain, inviolate, and silent ever. It is only when we come to this vision of her whom we call Isis or Hera or Orchil, or one of a hundred other names, our unknown Earth-Mother, that men and women will know each other aright, and go hand in hand along the road of Life without striving to crush, to subdue, to usurp, to retaliate, to separate.

Ah, fair vision of humanity to come! man and woman side by side, sweet, serene, true, simple, natural, fulfilling Earth's and Heaven's behests; unashamed, unsophisticated, unaffected, each to each and for each; children of one mother, inheritors of a like destiny, and, at the last, artificers of an equal fate.

Pondering thus, Alan rose and looked out into the night. In that great stillness, wherein the moonlight lay like the visible fragrance of the earth, he gazed long and intently. How shadowy, now, were these lives that had so lately palpitated in this very place; how strange their silence, their incommunicable knowledge, their fathomless peace!

Was it all lost ... the long endurance of pain, the pangs of sorrow? If so, what was the lesson of life? Surely, to live with sweet serenity and gladness, content against the inevitable hour. There is solace of a kind in the idea of a common end, of that terrible processional march of life wherein the myriad is momentary, and the immeasurable is but a passing shadow. But, alas! it is only solace of a kind; for what heart that has beat to the pulse of love can relinquish the sweet dream of life, and what coronal can philosophy put upon the brows of youth in place of eternity?

No, no! of this he felt sure. In the Beauty of the World lies the ultimate redemption of our mortality. When we shall become at one with nature, in a sense profounder even than the poetic imaginings of most of us, we shall understand what now we fail to discern. The arrogance of those who would have the stars as candles for our night, and the universe as a pleasaunce for our thought, will be as impossible as the blind fatuity of those who say we are of dust, briefly vitalized, that shall be dust again, with no fragrance saved from the rude bankruptcy of life, no beauty raised up against the sun to bloom anew.

It is no idle dream, this; no idle dream that we are a perishing clan among the sons of God, because of this slow waning of our joy, of our passionate delight in the Beauty of the World. We have been unable to look out upon the shining of our star, for the vision overcomes us; and we have used veils which we call "scenery," "picturesqueness," and the like—poor, barren words that are so voiceless and remote before the rustle of leaves and the lap of water; before the ancient music of the wind, and all the sovran eloquence of the tides of light. But a day may come—nay, shall surely come—when indeed the poor and the humble shall inherit the earth; they who have not made a league with temporal evils, and out of whose heart shall arise the deep longing, that shall become universal, of the Renewal of Youth.

Often, in the days that followed their return to Kerival, Alan and Ynys talked of these hopes and fears. And, gradually, out of the beauty of the spring, out of the intensity of the green fire of life which everywhere flamed in the brown earth, on the hills, in the waters, in the heart and brain of man, in the whole living, breathing world, was born of them a new joy. They were as the prince and princess of the fairy tales, for whom every thing was wonderful. Hand in hand they entered into the kingdom of youth. It was theirs, thenceforth; and all the joy of the world.

To live, and love, and be full of a deep joy, a glad content, a supporting hope! What destiny among the stars fairer than this?

They would be harbingers of joy. That was what they said, one to another. They would be so glad with sweet life that others would rejoice; out of their strength they would strengthen, out of their joy they would gladden, out of their peace they would comfort, out of their knowledge they would be compassionate.

Nor was their dream an unfulfilled vision. As the weeks slipped into months, and the months lapsed into years, Alan and Ynys realized all that it is possible for man and woman to know of happiness. Happiness, duties, claims held them to Kerival; but there they lived in fair comradeship with their fellows, with the green forest, with all that nature had to give them for their delight through wind and wave, through shadow and shine, through changing seasons and the exquisite hazard of every passing hour.

To them both, too, came the added joy which they feared had been forfeited at Rona. When Ynys felt the child's hands on her breast, she was as one transformed by a light out of heaven. Alan, looking at mother and child, understood, with all his passion for the intimate wonder and mystery of nature, the deeper truth in the words of one of the greatest of men ... "the Souls of the Living are the Beauty of the World."

That sometimes a shadow fell was inevitable. None ever so dusked the sun-way of Alan's mind as when, remote in the forest of Kerival, he came upon the unkempt figure of Judik Kerbastiou, often carrying upon his shoulder a little child whose happy laughter was sweet to hear, in whose tawny hair was a light such as had gleamed in Annaik's, and whose eyes were blue as the north seas and as Alan's were.

Often, too, Alan, alone in his observatory, where he was wont to spend much of his time, knew that strange nostalgia of the mind for impossible things. Then, wrought for a while from his vision of green life, and flamed by another green fire than that born of the earth, he dreamed his dream. With him, the peopled solitude of night was a concourse of confirming voices. He did not dread the silence of the stars—the cold remoteness of the stellar fire.

In that other watch-tower in Paris, where he had spent the best hours of his youth, he had loved that nightly watch of the constellations. Now, as then, in the pulse of the planets he found assurances which Faith had not given him. In the vast, majestic order of that nocturnal march, that diurnal retreat, he had learned the law of the whirling leaf and the falling star; of the slow, Æon-delayed comet and of the slower wane of solar fires. Looking with visionary eyes into that congregation of stars, he realized, not the littleness of the human dream but its divine impulsion. It was only when, after long vigils into the quietudes of night, he turned his gaze from the palaces of the unknown, and thought of the baffled, fretful swarming in the cities of men, that his soul rose in revolt against the sublime ineptitude of man's spiritual leaguer against destiny.

Destiny—An Dan—it was a word familiar to him since childhood, when first he had heard it on the lips of old Ian Macdonald. And once, on the eve of the Feast of Paschal, when Alan had asked Daniel Darc what was the word which the stars spelled from zenith to nadir, the astronomer had turned and answered simply, "C'est le Destin." But Alan was of the few to whom this talismanic word opens lofty perspectives, even while it obscures those paltry vistas which we deem unending and dignify with vain hopes and void immortalities.

THE END

Transcriber's Note
Variations in spelling, punctuation and hyphenation have been retained except in obvious cases of typographical errors.