The Dark Star, Robert W. Chambers [e reader books txt] 📗
- Author: Robert W. Chambers
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She opened the door, paused on the step; the frosty breath drifted from her lips. Then she looked back over her shoulder; her mother kissed her, held her tightly for a moment.
“If I’m to be forbidden to draw pictures,” repeated the girl, “I don’t know what will become of me. Because I really live there—in the pictures I make.”
“We’ll talk it over this evening, darling. Don’t draw in study hour any more, will you?”
“I’ll try to remember, mother.”
When the spindle-limbed, boyish figure had sped away beyond sight, Mrs. Carew shut the door, drew her wool 26 shawl closer, and returned slowly to the sitting-room. Her husband, deep in a padded rocking-chair by the window, was already absorbed in the volume which lay open on his knees—the life of the Reverend Adoniram Judson—one of the world’s good men. Ruhannah had named her cat after him.
His wife seated herself. She had dishes to do, two bedrooms, preparations for noonday dinner—the usual and unchangeable routine. She turned and looked out of the window across brown fields thinly powdered with snow. Along a brawling, wintry-dark stream, fringed with grey alders, ran the Brookhollow road. Clumps of pines and elms bordered it. There was nothing else to see except a distant crow in a ten-acre lot, walking solemnly about all by himself.
... Like the vultures that wandered through the compound that dreadful day in May ... she thought involuntarily.
But it was a far cry from Trebizond to Brookhollow. And her husband had been obliged to give up after the last massacre, when every convert had been dragged out and killed in the floating shadow of the Stars and Stripes, languidly brilliant overhead.
For the Sublime Porte and the Kurds had had their usual way at last; there was nothing left of the Mission; school and converts were gone; her wounded husband, her baby, and herself refugees in a foreign consulate; and the Turkish Government making apologies with its fat tongue in its greasy cheek.
The Koran says: “Woe to those who pray, and in their prayers are careless.”
The Koran also says: “In the name of God the Compassionate, the Merciful: What thinkest thou of him who treateth our religion as a lie?” 27
Mrs. Carew and her crippled husband knew, now, what the Sublime Porte thought about it, and what was the opinion of the Kurdish cavalry concerning missionaries and converts who treated the Moslem religion as a lie.
She looked at her pallid and crippled husband; he was still reading; his crutches lay beside him on the floor. She turned her eyes to the window. Out there the solitary crow was still walking busily about in the frozen pasture. And again she remembered the vultures that hulked and waddled amid the débris of the burned Mission.
Only that had been in May; and above the sunny silence in that place of death had sounded the unbroken and awful humming of a million million flies....
And so, her husband being now hopelessly broken and useless, they had come back with their child, Ruhannah, to their home in Brookhollow.
Here they had lived ever since; here her grey life was passing; here her daughter was already emerging into womanhood amid the stark, unlovely environments of a country crossroads, arid in summer, iron naked in winter, with no horizon except the Gayfield hills, no outlook save the Brookhollow road. And that led to the mill.
She had done what she could—was still doing it. But there was nothing to save. Her child’s destiny seemed to be fixed.
Her husband corresponded with the Board of Missions, wrote now and then for the Christian Pioneer, and lived on the scanty pension allowed to those who, like himself, had become incapacitated in line of duty. There was no other income. 28
There was, however, the six thousand dollars left to Ruhannah by her grandmother, slowly accumulating interest in the Mohawk Bank at Orangeville, the county seat, and not to be withdrawn, under the terms of the will, until the day Ruhannah married or attained, unmarried, her twenty-fifth year.
Neither principal nor interest of this legacy was available at present. Life in the Carew family at Brookhollow was hard sledding, and bid fair to continue so indefinitely.
The life of Ruhannah’s father was passed in reading or in gazing silently from the window—a tall, sallow, bearded man with the eyes of a dreaming martyr and the hands of an invalid—who still saw in the winter sky, across brown, snow-powdered fields, the minarets of Trebizond.
In reading, in reflection, in dreaming, in spiritual acquiescence, life was passing in sombre shadows for this middle-aged man who had been hopelessly crushed in Christ’s service; and who had never regretted that service, never complained, never doubted the wisdom and the mercy of his Leader’s inscrutable manœuvres with the soldiers who enlist to follow Him. As far as that is concerned, the Reverend Wilbour Carew had been born with a believing mind; doubt of divine goodness in Deity was impossible for him; doubt of human goodness almost as difficult.
Such men have little chance in a brisk, busy, and jaunty world; but they prefer it should be that way with them. And of these few believers in the goodness of God and man are our fools and gentlemen composed.
On that dreadful day, the Kurd who had mangled him so frightfully that he recovered only to limp 29 through life on crutches bent over him and shouted in his face:
“Now, you Christian dog, before I cut your throat show me how this Christ of yours can be a god!”
“Is it necessary,” replied the missionary faintly, “to light a candle in order to show a man the midday sun?”
Which was possibly what saved his life, and the lives of his wife and child. Your Moslem adores and understands such figurative answers. So he left the Reverend Mr. Carew lying half dead in the blackened doorway and started cheerfully after a frightened convert praying under the compound wall.
A child on the floor, flat on her stomach in the red light of the stove, drawing pictures; her mother by the shaded lamp mending stockings; her father reading; a faint odour of kerosene from the glass lamp in the room, and the rattle of sleet on roof and window; this was one of her childhood memories which never faded through all the years of Ruhannah’s life.
Of her waking hours she preferred that hour after supper when, lying prone on the worn carpet, with pencil and paper, just outside the lamp’s yellow circle of light, her youthful imagination kindled and caught fire.
For at that hour the magic of the stove’s glowing eyes transformed the sitting-room chairs to furtive watchers of herself, made of her mother’s work-table a sly and spidery thing on legs, crouching in ambush; bewitched the ancient cottage piano so that its ivory keys menaced her like a row of monstrous teeth.
She adored it all. The tall secretary stared at her with owlish significance. Through that neutral veil where lamplight and shadow meet upon the wall, the engraved portrait of a famous and godly missionary peered down at her out of altered and malicious eyes; the claw-footed, haircloth sofa was a stealthy creature offering to entrap her with wide, inviting arms; three folded umbrellas leaned over the edge of their shadowy stand, looking down at her like scrawny and baleful 31 birds, ready to peck at her with crooked handles. And as for Adoniram, her lank black cat, the child’s restless creative fancy was ever transforming him from goblin into warlock, from hydra to hippogriff, until the earnestness of pretence sent agreeable shivers down her back, and she edged a trifle nearer to her mother.
But when pretence became a bit too real and too grotesque she had always a perfect antidote. It was merely necessary to make a quick picture of an angel or two, a fairy prince, a swan, and she felt herself in their company, and delightfully protected.
There was a night when the flowing roar of the gale outside filled the lamplit silence; when the snow was drifting level with the window sills; when Adoniram, unable to prowl abroad, lay curled up tight and sound asleep beside her where she sat on the carpet in the stove radiance. Wearied of drawing castles and swans, she had been listening to her father reading passages aloud from the book on his knees to her mother who was sewing by the lamp.
Presently he continued his reading:
“I asked Alaro the angel: ‘Which place is this, and which people are these?’
“And he answered: ‘This place is the star-track; and these are they who in the world offered no prayers and chanted no liturgies. Through other works they have attained felicity.’”
Her mother nodded, continuing to sew. Ruhannah considered what her father had read, then:
“Father?”
“Yes––” He looked down at her absently.
“What were you reading?”
“A quotation from the Sacred Anthology.” 32
“Isn’t prayer really necessary?”
Her mother said:
“Yes, dear.”
“Then how did those people who offered no prayers go to Heaven?”
Her father said:
“Eternal life is not attained by praise or prayer alone, Ruhannah. Those things which alone justify prayer are also necessary.”
“What are they?”
“What we really think and what we do—both only in Christ’s name. Without these nothing else counts very much—neither form nor convention nor those individual garments called creed and denomination, which belief usually wears throughout the world.”
Her mother, sewing, glanced gravely down at her daughter:
“Your father is very tolerant of what other people believe—as long as they really do believe. Your father thinks that Christ would have found friends in Buddha and Mahomet.”
“Do such people go to Heaven?” asked Ruhannah, astonished.
“Listen,” said her father, reading again:
“‘I came to a place and I saw the souls of the liberal, adorned above all other souls in splendour. And it seemed to me sublime.
“‘I saw the souls of the truthful who walked in lofty splendour. And it seemed to me sublime.
“‘I saw the souls of teachers and inquirers; I saw the friendly souls of interceders and peacemakers; and these walked brilliantly in the light. And it seemed to me sublime––’”
He turned to his wife: 33
“To see and know is sublime. We know, Mary; and Ruhannah is intelligent. But in spite of her faith in what she has learned from us, like us she must one day travel the common way, seeking for herself the reasons and the evidences of immortality.”
“Perhaps her faith, Wilbour––”
“Perhaps. But with the intelligent, faith, which is emotional, usually follows belief; and belief comes only from reasoning. I think that Ruhannah is destined to travel the way of all intelligence when she is ready to think for herself.”
“I am ready now,” said the girl. “I have faith in our Lord Jesus, and in my father and mother.”
Her father looked at her:
“It is good building material. Some day, God willing, you shall build a very lofty temple with it. But the foundation of the temple must first be certain. Intelligence ultimately requires reasons for belief. You will have to seek them for yourself, Ruhannah. Then, on them build your shrine of faith; and nothing shall shake it down.”
“I don’t understand.”
“And I cannot explain. Only this; as you grow older, all around you in the world you will become aware of people, countless millions and millions of people, asking themselves—ready with the slightest encouragement, or without it, to ask you the question which is the most vital of all questions to them. And whatever way it is answered always they ask for evidence. You, too, will one day ask for evidence. All the world asks for it. But few recognise it as evidence when it is offered.”
He closed his book and dropped a heavy hand upon it. 34
“Amid the myriad pursuits and interests and
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