Chambers Robert William
The Dark Star

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.

CHAPTER III
IN EMBRYO

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 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.”

“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:

“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.

“Amid the myriad pursuits and interests and trades and professions of the human race, amid their multitudinous aspirations, perplexities, doubts, passions, endeavours, deep within every intelligent man remains one dominant desire, one persistent question to be answered if possible.”

“What desire, father?”

“The universal desire for another chance – for immortality. Man’s never-ending demand for evidence of an immortality which shall terminate for him the most tremendous of all uncertainties, which shall solve for him the most vital of all questions: What is to become of him after physical death? Is he to live again? Is he to see once more those whom he loved the best?”

Ruhannah sat thinking in the red stove light, cross-legged, her slim ankles clasped in either hand.

“But our souls are immortal,” she said at last.

“Yes.”

“Our Lord Jesus has said it.”

“Yes.”

“Then why should anybody not believe it?”

“Try to believe it always. Particularly after your mother and I are no longer here, try to believe it… You are unusually intelligent; and if some day your intelligence discovers that it requires evidence for belief seek for that evidence. It is obtainable. Try to recognise it when you encounter it… Only, in any event, remember this: never alter your early faith, never destroy your childhood’s belief until evidence to prove the contrary convinces you.”

“No… There is no such evidence, is there, father?”

“I know of none.”

“Then,” said the girl calmly, “I shall take Christ’s evidence that I shall live again if I do no evil… Father?”

“Yes.”

“Is there any evidence that Adoniram has no soul?”

“I know of none.”

“Is there any that he has a soul?”

“Yes, I think there is.”

“Are you sure?”

“Not entirely.”

“I wonder,” mused the girl, looking gravely at the sleeping cat.

It was the first serious doubt that Ruhannah had ever entertained in her brief career.

That night she dreamed of the Yellow Devil in Herr Wilner’s box, and, awaking, remembered her dream. It seemed odd, too, because she had not even thought of the Yellow Devil for over a year.

But the menacing Mongol figure seemed bound to intrude into her life once more and demand her attention as though resentful of long oblivion and neglect; for, a week later, an old missionary from Indo-China – a native Chinese – who had lectured at the Baptist Church in Gayfield the evening previous, came to pay his respects to the Reverend Wilbour Carew. And Rue had taken the Yellow Devil from the olive-wood box that day and was busily making a pencil drawing of it.

At sight of the figure the native missionary’s narrow almond eyes opened extremely wide, and he leaned on the table and regarded the bronze demon very intently.

Then he took from his pocket and adjusted to his button nose a pair of large, horn spectacles; and he carefully examined the Chinese characters engraved on the base of the ancient bronze, following them slowly with a yellow and clawlike forefinger.

“Can you read what is written there?” inquired the Reverend Mr. Carew.

“Yes, brother. This is what is written: ‘I am Erlik, Ruler of Chaos and of All that Was. The old order passes when I arrive. I bring confusion among the peoples; I hurl down emperors; kingdoms crumble where I pass; the world begins to rock and tip, spilling nations into outer darkness. When there are no more kingdoms and no more kings; no more empires and no emperors; and when only the humble till, the blameless sow, the pure reap; and when only the teachers teach in the shadow of the Tree, and when the Thinker sits unstirring under the high stars, then, from the dark edges of the world I let go my grasp and drop into those immeasurable deeps from which I came – I, Erlik, Ruler of All that Was.’”

After a silence the Reverend Mr. Carew asked whether the figure was a very old one.

“It is before the period called ‘Han’ – a dynasty during which the Mongols were a mighty people. This inscription is Mongol. Erlik was the Yellow Devil of the Mongols.”

“Not a heathen god, then?”

“No, a heathen devil. Their Prince of Darkness.”

Ruhannah, pencil in hand, looked curiously at this heathen Prince of Darkness, arrived out of the dark ages to sit to her for his scowling portrait.

“I wonder what he thinks of America,” she said, partly to herself.

The native missionary smiled, picked up the Yellow Devil, shook the figure, listening.

“There is something inside,” he said; “perhaps jewels. If you drilled a hole in him you could find out.”

The Reverend Mr. Carew nodded absently:

“Yes; it might be worth while,” he said.

“If there is a jewel,” repeated the missionary, “you had better take it, then cast away the figure. Erlik brings disaster to the land where his image is set up.”

The Reverend Mr. Carew smiled at his Chinese and Christian confrère’s ineradicable vein of superstition.

CHAPTER IV
THE TRODDEN WAY

There came the indeterminate year when Ruhannah finished school and there was no money available to send her elsewhere for further embellishment, no farther horizon than the sky over the Gayfield hills, no other perspective than the main street of Gayfield with the knitting mill at the end of it.

So into Gayfield Mill the girl walked, and found a place immediately among the unskilled. And her career appeared to be predetermined now, and her destiny a simple one – to work, to share the toil and the gaieties of Gayfield with the majority of the other girls she knew; to marry, ultimately, some boy, some clerk in one of the Gayfield stores, some farmer lad, perhaps, possibly a school teacher or a local lawyer or physician, or possibly the head of some department in the mill, or maybe a minister – she was sufficiently well bred and educated for any one of these.

The winter of her seventeenth year found her still very much a child at heart, physically backward, a late adolescent, a little shy, inclined to silences, romantic, sensitive to all beauty, and passionately expressing herself only when curled up by the stove with her pencil and the red light of the coals falling athwart the slim hand that guided it.

She went sometimes to village parties, learned very easily to dance, had no preferences among the youths of Gayfield, no romances. For that matter, while she was liked and even furtively admired, her slight shyness, reticence, and a vague, indefinite something about her seemed to discourage familiar rustic gallantry. Also, she was as thin and awkward as an overgrown lad, not thought to be pretty, known to be poor. But for all that more than one young man was vaguely haunted at intervals by some memory of her grey eyes and the peculiar sweetness of her mouth, forgetting for the moment several freckles on the delicate bridge of her nose and several more on her sun-tanned cheeks.

She had an agreeable time that winter, enchanted to learn dancing, happy at “showers” and parties, at sleigh rides and “chicken suppers,” and the various species of village gaiety which ranged from moving pictures every Thursday and Saturday nights to church entertainments, amateur theatricals at the town hall, and lectures under the auspices of the aristocratic D. O. F. – Daughters of the Old Frontier.

But she never saw any boy she preferred to any other, never was conscious of being preferred, excepting once – and she was not quite certain about that.

It was old Dick Neeland’s son, Jim – vaguely understood to have been for several years in Paris studying art – and who now turned up in Gayfield during Christmas week.

Ruhannah remembered seeing him on several occasions when she was a little child. He was usually tramping across country with his sturdy father, Dick Neeland of Neeland’s Mills – an odd, picturesque pair with their setter dogs and burnished guns, and old Dick’s face as red as a wrinkled winter apple, and his hair snow-white.

There was six years’ difference between their ages, Jim Neeland’s and hers, and she had always considered him a grown and formidable man in those days. But that winter, when somebody at the movies pointed him out to her, she was surprised to find him no older than the other youths she skated with and danced with.

Afterward, at a noisy village party, she saw him dancing with every girl in town, and the drop of Irish blood in this handsome, careless young fellow established him at once as a fascinating favourite.

Rue became quite tremulous over the prospect of dancing with him. Presently her turn came; she rose with a sudden odd loss of self-possession as he was presented, stood dumb, shy, unresponsive, suffered him to lead her out, became slowly conscious that he danced rather badly. But awe of him persisted even when he trod on her slender foot.

He brought her an ice afterward, and seated himself beside her.

“I’m a clumsy dancer,” he said. “How many times did I spike you?”

She flushed and would have found a pleasant word to reassure him, but discovered nothing to say, it being perfectly patent to them both that she had retired from the floor with a slight limp.

“I’m a steam roller,” he repeated carelessly. “But you dance very well, don’t you?”

“I have only learned to dance this winter.”

“I thought you an expert. Do you live here?”

“Yes… I mean I live at Brookhollow.”

“Funny. I don’t remember you. Besides, I don’t know your name – people mumble so when they introduce a man.”

“I’m Ruhannah Carew.”

“Carew,” he repeated, while a crease came between his eyebrows. “Of Brookhollow– Oh, I know! Your father is the retired missionary – red house facing the bridge.”

“Yes.”

“Certainly,” he said, taking another look at her; “you’re the little girl daddy and I used to see across the fields when we were shooting woodcock in the willows.”

“I remember you,” she said.

“I remember you!”

She coloured gratefully.

“Because,” he added, “dad and I were always afraid you’d wander into range and we’d pepper you from the bushes. You’ve grown a lot, haven’t you?” He had a nice, direct smile though his speech and manners were a trifle breezy, confident, and sans façon. But he was at that age – which succeeds the age of bumptiousness – with life and career before him, attainment, realisation, success, everything the mystery of life holds for a young man who has just flung open the gates and who takes the magic road to the future with a stride instead of his accustomed pace.

He was already a man with a profession, and meant that she should become aware of it.

Later in the evening somebody told her what a personage he had become, and she became even more deeply thrilled, impressed, and tremulously desirous that he should seek her out again, not venturing to seek him, not dreaming of encouraging him to notice her by glance or attitude – not even knowing, as yet, how to do such things. She thought he had already forgotten her existence.

But that this thin, freckled young thing with grey eyes ought to learn how much of a man he was remained somewhere in the back of Neeland’s head; and when he heard his hostess say that somebody would have to see Rue Carew home, he offered to do it. And presently went over and asked the girl if he might – not too patronisingly.

In the cutter, under fur, with the moonlight electrically brilliant and the world buried in white, she ventured to speak of his art, timidly, as in the presence of the very great.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “I studied in Paris. Wish I were back there. But I’ve got to draw for magazines and illustrated papers; got to make a living, you see. I teach at the Art League, too.”

“How happy you must be in your career!” she said, devoutly meaning it, knowing no better than to say it.

“It’s a business,” he corrected her, kindly.

“But – yes – but it is art, too.”

“Oh, art!” he laughed. It was the fashion that year to shrug when art was mentioned – reaction from too much gabble.

“We don’t busy ourselves with art; we busy ourselves with business. When they use my stuff I feel I’m getting on. You see,” he admitted with reluctant honesty, “I’m young at it yet – I haven’t had very much of my stuff in magazines yet.”

After a silence, cursed by an instinctive truthfulness which always spoiled any little plan to swagger:

“I’ve had several – well, about a dozen pictures reproduced.”

One picture accepted by any magazine would have awed her sufficiently. The mere fact that he was an artist had been enough to impress her.

“Do you care for that sort of thing – drawing, painting, I mean?” he inquired kindly.

She drew a quick breath, steadied her voice, and said she did.

“Perhaps you may turn out stuff yourself some day.”

She scarcely knew how to take the word “stuff.” Vaguely she surmised it to be professional vernacular.

She admitted shyly that she cared for nothing so much as drawing, that she longed for instruction, but that such a dream was hopeless.

At first he did not comprehend that poverty barred the way to her; he urged her to cultivate her talent, bestowed advice concerning the Art League, boarding houses, studios, ways, means, and ends, until she felt obliged to tell him how far beyond her means such magic splendours lay.

He remained silent, sorry for her, thinking also that the chances were against her having any particular talent, consoling a heart that was unusually sympathetic and tender with the conclusion that this girl would be happier here in Brookhollow than scratching around the purlieus of New York to make both ends meet.

“It’s a tough deal,” he remarked abruptly. “ – I mean this art stuff. You work like the dickens and kick your heels in ante-rooms. If they take your stuff they send you back to alter it or redraw it. I don’t know how anybody makes a living at it – in the beginning.”

“Don’t you?”

“I? No.” He reddened; but she could not notice it in the moonlight. “No,” he repeated; “I have an allowance from my father. I’m new at it yet.”

“Couldn’t a man – a girl – support herself by drawing pictures for magazines?” she inquired tremulously.

“Oh, well, of course there are some who have arrived – and they manage to get on. Some even make wads, you know.”

“W-wads?” she repeated, mystified.

“I mean a lot of money. There’s that girl on the Star, Jean Throssel, who makes all kinds of wealth, they say, out of her spidery, filmy girls in ringlets and cheesecloth dinner gowns.”

“Oh!”

“Yes, Jean Throssel, and that Waythorne girl, Belinda Waythorne, you know – does all that stuff for The Looking Glass– futurist graft, no mouths on her people – she makes hers, I understand.”

It was rather difficult for Rue to follow him amid the vernacular mazes.

“Then, of course,” he continued, “men like Alexander Fairless and Philip Lightwood who imitates him, make fortunes out of their drawing. I could name a dozen, perhaps. But the rest – hard sledding, Miss Carew!”

“Is it very hard?”

“Well, I don’t know what on earth I’d do if dad didn’t back me as his fancy.”

“A father ought to, if he can afford it.”

“Oh, I’ll pay my way some day. It’s in me. I feel it; I know it. I’ll make plenty of money,” he assured her confidently.

“I’m sure you will.”

“Thank you,” he smiled. “My friends tell me I’ve got it in me. I have one friend in particular – the Princess Mistchenka – who has all kinds of confidence in my future. When I’m blue she bolsters me up. She’s quite wonderful. I owe her a lot for asking me to her Sunday nights and for giving me her friendship.”

“A – a princess?” whispered the girl, who had drawn pictures of thousands but was a little startled to realise that such fabled creatures really exist.

“Is she very beautiful?” she added.

“She’s tremendously pretty.”

“Her – clothes are very beautiful, I suppose,” ventured Rue.

“Well – they’re very – smart. Everything about her is smart. Her Sunday night suppers are wonderful. You meet people who do things – all sorts – everybody who is somebody.”

He turned to her frankly:

“I think myself very lucky that the Princess Mistchenka should be my friend, because, honestly, Miss Carew, I don’t see what there is in me to interest such a woman.”

Rue thought she could see, but remained silent.

“If I had my way,” said Neeland, a few moments later, “I’d drop illustrating and paint battle scenes. But it wouldn’t pay, you see.”

“Couldn’t you support yourself by painting battles?”

“Not yet,” he said honestly. “Of course I have hopes – intentions–” he laughed, drew his reins; the silvery chimes clashed and jingled and flashed in the moonlight; they had arrived.

At the door he said:

“I hope some day you’ll have a chance to take lessons. Thank you for dancing with me… If you ever do come to New York to study, I hope you’ll let me know.”

“Yes,” she said, “I will.”

He was halfway to his sleigh, looked back, saw her looking back as she entered the lighted doorway.

“Good night, Rue,” he said impulsively, warmly sorry for her.

“Good night,” she said.

The drop of Irish blood in him prompted him to go back to where she stood framed in the lighted doorway. And the same drop was no doubt responsible for his taking her by the waist and tilting back her head in its fur hood and kissing her soft, warm lips.

She looked up at him in a flushed, bewildered sort of way, not resisting; but his eyes were so gay and mischievous, and his quick smile so engaging that a breathless, uncertain smile began to edge her lips; and it remained stamped there, stiffening even after he had jumped into his cutter and had driven away, jingling joyously out into the dazzling moonshine.

In bed, the window open, and the covers pulled to her chin, Rue lay wakeful, living over again the pleasures of the evening; and Neeland’s face was always before her open eyes, and his pleasant voice seemed to be sounding in her ears. As for the kiss, it did not trouble her. Girls she went with were not infrequently so saluted by boys. That, being her own first experience, was important only in that degree. And she shyly thought the experience agreeable. And, as she recalled, revived, and considered all that Neeland had said, it seemed to her that this young man led an enchanted life and that such as he were indeed companions fit for princesses.

“Princess Mistchenka,” she repeated aloud to herself. And somehow it sounded vaguely familiar to the girl, as though somewhere, long ago, she had heard another voice pronounce the name.