The Master Knot of Human Fate

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"You never asked me," she answered. "'A dumb priest loses his
benefice.' But I was speaking of my club. We studied Andersen all
winter, and got enough more out of him than a lot of us who pored over
Ibsen, guided by a literary expert. Andersen has a more beautiful, a
more inspiring philosophy. Every nation has its story of Psyche, the
lost soul of things, but none is more beautiful than the tale of Gerda
and Kay. There were children in that club who were cruel, horribly
cruel, and one day when we gave an entertainment for them, one of the
older girls recited the story of 'The Daisy and the Lark.' They cried
as I had cried over it years before."

"I remember," he said. "It broke my heart when I was a little shaver.
I couldn't give so sad a story as that to a child."

"Oh, yes, you could," she said, "if the child needed it. The world was
cruel, cruel, Adam; I used to wonder sometimes why God did not blot it
all out, as He has blotted it out now. Once in another club, a big,
swell affair, there was a Humane Society programme. One woman, in a
Persian lamb jacket, spoke on the evils of the overcheck; you know how
they get that wool? And women nodded the aigrettes in their bonnets,
torn from the old birds while the little ones starved to death, to
show their approval, and patted their hands gloved in the skins of
kids, sewed in cloth soon after their birth so they couldn't grow a
fleece, and tortured all their short lives, and went home to eat
pate-de-foie gras, and broil live lobsters, thanking God they were not
as the rest of men, if only they let out their check-reins a hole or
so. It was horrible,--the cruelties men practised to gratify appetite,
and that women were guilty of for vanity. I suppose I am a monomaniac
on the subject, but we never seemed far removed from barbarians, when
we went clothed in the skins of wild animals, and decorated with their
heads and tails and feathers, like so many Sioux chiefs. The varnish
of civilization isn't dry on us yet. Why, if a ship should come here
now, do you know what they would do first, unless they happened to be
East Indians? They would say they wanted some fresh meat, and offer to
buy Lily; she is the fattest of the cows. If we wouldn't sell her,
they would probably take her anyway."

"Kill Lily," cried Adam, angrily. "They'd have me to kill first;
nothing on this place is going to be slaughtered while I can protect
it." He went on more slowly, a little ashamed of his heat, "I feel a
sense of kinship with all these creatures that would make it
impossible to kill them. It's like the woman whose Newfoundland died,
and a friend asked if she was going to have him stuffed. 'Stuffed!'
she said; 'I'd as soon think of stuffing my husband!'"

Robin laughed, and leaning over tweaked Lassie's ear. "If we are to be
stuffed, we prefer to have it an ante-mortem performance, don't we,
little dog?"

The sun dropped behind the tall peaks, but its dying light still
covered sea and shore. They rose as if for the benediction, and looked
out at the waters before them. Then they looked at each other and grew
white to the lips, and Robin knelt down and flinging her arms around
Lassie sobbed and laughed. Adam never took his eyes from the coming
ship.

XIII

Every ship brings a word;
Well for those who have no fear,
Looking seaward well assured
That the word the vessel brings
Is the word they wish to hear.

EMERSON.

The ship bore steadily toward them, but night was coming on so rapidly
that her lines were obscured. They could not even tell whether it was
a sailing vessel or propelled by steam.

"There's one thing certain," said Adam, excitedly: "it was coming this
way, but very slowly. I suppose that is to be expected of a ship
sailing unknown waters. They have nothing to go by, though they know,
of course, just what part of the round globe they are on."

She answered almost apathetically, as if she found it difficult to
talk, "It seems as if good sailors would lay by at night, when they do
not know their course, and there is land in sight,--land that has
never been explored."

"It does seem strange she should come right on," he assented. "For
surely no ship has ever sailed these seas before. Perhaps--"

"Perhaps what?"

"Perhaps she has been clear around; perhaps this is the only bit of
land left above a world ocean."

Robin shivered a little, and Adam turned toward the beacon, that had
glowed in vain for a year. It had been built on a high, altar-shaped
rock, across the gorge, where it could be kept up without leaving the
park. Robin went with him, and they gathered a pile of timber that
insured the brilliancy of their signal until morning. Adam piled on
the logs till the blaze leaped far up in the darkness; then they went
back to the boulder and sat down to think and wait.

"See how the wind is rising," said Robin, breaking a silence of an
hour, during which even Lassie had been motionless.

"But it is toward land," answered Adam.

"But the same wind that brings us the ship may dash it to pieces on
this awful coast."

"True, but she is far enough out to make herself secure. Oh, Robin,
suppose she sails around us and goes on!"

"That is impossible," answered Robin. "The people on that ship are as
anxious to find us as we can be to see them, if they are civilized at
all. Noah and Mt. Ararat are not to be named in the same day with us."

Adam crossed the gorge and added fuel to the fire. For a time the wind
increased in velocity until a stiff gale was blowing, then, as the
small hours came on, it waned, and the beacon flared straight up once
more.

"I wonder where's she from?" said Adam.

"I wonder where she is now," answered Robin.

"I feel sure," he said, "when morning comes we shall see her riding
the waves out there; and think of it, Robin, we can go!"

Robin made no reply, and her very silence made Adam repeat, but as a
self-addressed question, "Go where? Yes," he went on quickly, "go
where, Robin. Suppose the ship is all right, and that she stops, and
the crew are not pirates, and are willing to take us aboard, where are
we to go? Is there any place on earth that can mean as much to us as
this island? Suppose Asia, or Africa, or Europe are still in
existence, we should not regain our friends and relatives, and life
would be harder with strange people, under a strange government, far
more so than we have found it here, even without so many of its
luxuries."

Robin shook her head sadly. "At first, Adam. We should learn their
language and their customs. New friends are speedily acquired, and as
for relatives,--well, in the scheme of life relatives don't count for
much. There always comes a time when they step out of our lives,
anyway."

"But as to happiness?"

Her face paled a little. "Have you been happy here?" she asked,
without raising her eyes to his, and then went on, not waiting for a
reply, "If you have been, it has been in the care of our little family
of dependents, who do not need you half so much as the great family of
human dependents. Rest assured if there is a continent over there
across the darkness, it is peopled with beings who need the devoted
and unselfish labors of such a man as you. You would find your work
easily enough,--the work you have been saved for, the work you must
do."

"But if there is no continent left?" he queried.

"In that case there must be islands; there were many mountains higher
than these, and they are peopled, no doubt. Shall we not go to these
other orphans, deserted by Mother Earth, our brothers and sisters,
through our common calamity?"

Both were silent, engrossed in their own thoughts. A return to the
world meant going back to the uncivilized rush of civilization. It
meant the eternal question of what shall we eat, and what shall we
drink, and where-withal shall we be clothed? It meant the old
competition, the stern old law of the survival of the brawniest. Above
all, to Robin, it meant separation from Adam, for once more in Rome,
the customs of Rome must be followed. To do Adam justice, this was a
contingency which did not enter his mind. As he had said before,
whatever had put them in this dream together would keep them there, so
that when he thought of relinquishing all the comfort and ease and
quiet of his present life, all the loving animals, the cosy little
house, the tiny fields, the blooming garden, it never occurred to him
that he must relinquish more than all these things, more than the
peace and harmony, that which, unconsciously, had come to be the very
guiding star of his life.

"I wonder if whoever is left cares for grand opera?" said Robin,
rather grimly.

"Why?" asked Adam in so startled a voice that she laughed
hysterically.

"It's the only thing I know well enough to make a living at it," she
said laconically. "I think the fire needs some more wood, Adam."

As he replenished it, her words burned themselves upon his brain, and
he realized in an instant that a return to the old world meant giving
up this supreme friend, all that he had left in the world, all there
was for him in any world. The thing was impossible. He turned to go
back to her, some kind of an impetuous avowal on his lips, but she had
left the boulder and walked down almost to the edge of a precipitous
cliff which they had called "Lover's Leap," in a spirit of badinage.
She stood there quietly, watching the gray dawn, and his heart
impelled him to go to her and take her in his arms. As his love
revealed itself to him in all its power, it seemed impossible that he
should know it now for the first time. Why, why, had he been so blind?
If the ship took them away--

He walked unsteadily down to her, resolved to say nothing. If she
wanted to go, her wish should be sufficient.

The dawn came slowly, but it came at last. As the darkness lifted, a
slight fog settled over the face of the waters. Instinctively they
recalled that other night when they had watched through the mist and
his hand closed over hers. The sun was well up before the east wind
dissipated it, and left only the dancing waves, brilliantly blue,
stretching away into the dawn. On all that broad expanse there was not
so much as a cockle-shell afloat.

Robin turned and looked to right and left in bewilderment, and then at
Adam.

His chest was heaving, and as his eyes searched her face he cried,
"Thank God," and gathered her up in his arms. She nestled there
without a word.

They crossed the gorge and scattered the brands of their watch-fire,
and walked on down to the cove. Suddenly Lassie came bounding toward
them uttering short, excited barks. They quickened their pace, and as
they came in sight of the beach discovered the object of her alarm.
Against a small promontory, lying on one side, was the ship they had
sighted the evening before. It was a hopeless wreck, and had borne to
them no living thing. Yet it had served its purpose. It had revealed
their love for each other, and told them that they had hoped against a
second deluge in vain.

XIV

The truth of truths is love.

BAILEY.

As Adam went about his morning's work he was filled with a sense of
gladness, an exaltation of life he had never known before. He
stretched out his arms, as if to let all the glory of the earth meet
the profounder splendor of his soul. As he walked down the garden path
he looked with affection at the flowers they had planted together. But
for the absurdity of it, he could have woven a chaplet of them and
worn it. But the world had reached that height of civilization where
the symbol of the glad and living thing was too emotional; always and
everywhere we preferred the dead thing, the skin of the seal, the
shroud of the silkworm, the straw that was left after the flowers were
gone; and Adam was still civilized.

He accepted his happiness without a question. It was too real, too
keen, too great a revelation for him to stop to analyze it. He knew it
in every pulsation of his heart, in every imagination of his mind, and
with the quickened senses of the lover he perceived that Robin's
feelings differed from his own. For a year he had been lost in
introspection; now they seemed to have changed places, and she grew
silent and almost reserved.

"What is it, dear?" he said. "No, don't try to evade an answer. We
must not stop being frank with each other now."

She did not reply at once, and when she did her voice was so low that
he had to stoop to catch the words. "Do you think you do love me as
fully as you might have loved some one else, younger and happier than
I, better fitted to you? It doesn't seem as if you could; you never
did in the old days, you never even thought of it."

Adam laughed lightly. "I beg of you spare me, for this isn't 'so
sudden' at all." Then seeing that her mood forbade jest, he went on
seriously: "Really, I mean it. It's true I never made you pretty
speeches in the old days, nor stopped to consider whether I might have
done so had things been different; but then I never made pretty
speeches to any one. From the very beginning I have taken you as a
matter of course. It always seemed as if we had known each other from
the very first. You entered into my plans as if you had known them as
you might if we had gone to the same little red schoolhouse. I wish we
had! I'm jealous of the years when I didn't know you."

"But a whole year," she said doubtfully. "Are you sure it isn't just
loneliness and propinquity?"

Adam kissed her fingers one at a time. "You are going to beg my pardon
for that some day," he said. "You are not very vain, my sweetheart;
how could I help loving you?"

"That's just what I am finding fault with," she said with a sudden
twinkle of fun in her eyes. "You have managed to keep from it so long.
But seriously, I am not the kind of a woman I should have fancied you
would care for. I am, at least I was, very weary of life; I knew too
much about it. And I am older than you."

He looked at her critically. "You were, a year ago," he answered; "I
don't know how much, two or three years--"

"Five," she said.

"Well, five; but this last year you have been growing young. The very
fact that you were tired of the old life made it less of a strain for
you to give it up. The tired look is all gone, even from your eyes,
whereas lots of gray has come into my hair. You had learned to live in
yourself and your music. My whole scheme of life was wrapped up in the
social existence of our time. In a way I lost more than you did. I
have learned a good deal this past year. Five years ago, if I had
loved you, there would have been many inequalities between us that do
not exist to-day. Now it seems to me we are as absolutely mated, as
much parts of one whole as the two halves of the brain, or the right
and left ventricles of our hearts. It is no disparagement of you or of
myself to say that no boy could appreciate you. The measure of a man's
manhood is his ability to understand the highest type of womanhood. As
to your being worldly, that's all nonsense." He stroked her hair a few
minutes in silence, and then said, half quizzically, "You might
question me, if I said it, but this is what Balzac said of women like
you: 'A woman who has received a man's education possesses a faculty
which is the most fertile in happiness for herself and her husband;
but that woman is as rare as happiness itself.'"

She looked pleased, but she did not reply, and he went on.

"Do you still doubt me? Well, then, know that I have loved you from
the very beginning, for love, when it comes, is a retroactive law of
our being. If I had loved you less, if you had seemed less a part of
me, I might have realized it sooner."

She shook her head. "I have known that I loved you for a long time,
months," she said.

"Then you ought to have known I loved you," he answered quickly.
"Don't you think it is possible to love with our souls, our
subconsciousness, and realize with our slow brains, after months and
years, what our hearts knew at once? Even love has become more or less
of a mental process. We reason about things instead of feeling them,
and yet when we come to our last analyses we don't _know_ anything; we
simply feel. When the scientist says, 'The amoeba moves out of the
shade into the sunlight because it wants the sunlight,' he bases his
postulate upon what he feels, and believes that the atom feels. This
is all that he knows. We do not seek warmth because we have calculated
its effects upon us, but because we feel cold. Oh, we have starved our
feelings to feed our brains, until the mind believes it is the
immortal part of us, instead of realizing that what we know, we are
merely re-discovering, while what we feel is our apperception of the
infinite. If we had the courage to be true to our feelings, instead of
our thoughts, I believe it would be a better, as it would certainly be
a truer, world."

"Do you really think more people are guided by thought than by
feeling?" she asked with a good deal of surprise.

"Perhaps not in one sense," he answered. "A great many people are
carried along by their impulses, their transitory emotions, which are
not, properly speaking, feelings at all. They make what some one calls
the 'fatal error of mistaking the eddy for the current.' But among
educated people it seems to me that we think too much, especially of
our own thoughts, and feel too little. All this year I have not said
that I loved you; I don't know that I have thought it, but I have felt
and lived it. Sometimes I have not been thoughtful--"

"You have always been too thoughtful," she interrupted.

"No, but when I have been inconsiderate it was because you were
myself, the best self that we overlook sometimes, but return to with
unfailing loyalty. You were not bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh;
that is a very low and material view of what you have been and are to
me, heart of my heart and soul of my soul. I cannot think of a life
apart from you, for you are my life. Marriage is not a matter of a
license and a ceremony and Mendelssohn and gaping crowds and a tour.
We do not need any one to tell us that what God has joined cannot be
sundered by man. All this year has been a long wedding of every
thought and feeling and desire, until I have looked into your eyes to
see my own wish. We have thought and thought, but that way madness
lies. Now I feel that all the world we have lost, lives for us in
every glorious possibility in each other. For I know that you love
me."

"Yes," she said, "I think I have loved you all along, but it never
entered my dreams that you could love me. Even now, when you tell me,
it does not seem as if it could be so, either by the mental process,
or by that of feeling."

He caught her in his arms and kissed her, a kiss so long and tender
that it left her clinging to him, breathless and half awakened.

"Don't think," he said, "feel,--feel my heart and know that every beat
is for you, that every atom of me calls for you, and every drop of
blood obeys, as it would command you. I have tried to reach the ideal
of the love that says, not 'thou must be mine,' but 'I must be thine,'
but I have failed if you can doubt me."

She flung her arms around his neck with sudden passion.

"This is the greatest, the most perfect dream of all," she said; "I
think it must be heaven."

"A new heaven and a new earth," he answered gently.

XV

Women alone know how much attraction there is in the respect which
a master shows them.

BALZAC.

The derelict did not afford them much amusement or information. The
waves soon beat her to pieces on the savage rocks. Apparently she had
been a ship plying between Western ports, probably San Francisco and
Honolulu. In the wreckage washed up there were a few pounds of rice,
and some brooms of what they believed to be sugar-cane. There was
nothing else.

"Not even a lemon!" Robin said disconsolately. "Think of living all
one's natural life not only ten, but ten thousand miles from a lemon."

Adam laughed sympathetically. "It's like a yachting party I remember;
we found that the boat we had engaged had been taken by somebody else,
and our set had to be divided. Later in the evening we discovered that
we had all the sugar and the other crowd all the lemons. ''Twas ever
thus from childhood's hour, I've seen my fondest hopes decay: I never
wanted something sour, but what molasses came my way.' Never mind,
dear. We will go and plant our sugar, and by the time it is ready to
sweeten anything, a whole cargo of lemons may have floated into harbor
right at our door."

They crossed the ranges to the western coast, where there was lower
ground, better fitted to the supposed requirements of rice and cane,
and had a good deal of amusement out of their ignorance, neither of
them having more than a misty idea about either rice or sugar before
they reach the stage to be served together.

It was quite late when they were through and camped for supper.
Remembering their trip of a few weeks previous, that now seemed so
long ago, Adam said, "Are you too tired to sing, dear? It is so long
since I have heard you."

She stood up and thought for a moment, and then putting back her
loosened hair began with Bourdillon's "The night has a thousand eyes,"
and sang on and on. At last, turning to Adam with a little fond
gesture, and altering the words slightly, she sang:

"Like a laverlock in the lift, sing, O bonny bride!
All the world was Adam once, with Eve by his side.
What's the world, my lad, my love? What can it do?
I am thine, and thou art mine; life is sweet and new.
If the world have missed the mark, let it stand by,
For we two have gotten leave, and once more we'll try."

"'Once more,'" Adam repeated. "Once more, my darling! Oh, life is
sweet and new for us; we can afford to lose the world! When will you
come to me, love, when?"

She shook her head with a little wilful laugh, and all the glistening
glory of her hair fell about her like a wedding veil.

"Wait," she said; "wait a little. The flax is not nearly ready for
spinning yet; can a bride forget her attire? Besides, how can we be--"
she paused, and let her silence fill the gap, "when I know we neither
of us know any ceremony more dignified than hopping over a
broomstick?"

They started homeward, walking slowly through the dimly lighted
mountain gorges, talking the ineffable nonsense that lovers never
weary of. As they came to a brook that rushed noisily down the ravine,
Adam stepped across, and held out his hand to her.

"Wait a moment," he said, "just where you are, dear, and say this with
me:--

"'Over running water: my love I give to you, my life I pledge to you,
my heart I take not back from you while this water runs.

"'Over running water: every seventh year, at this time of the year, at
this hour of the night, I will meet you here to renew my troth; death
alone to relieve me of this vow.'"

"Is that all?" she asked wonderingly. "Over running water, while this
water runs, while there is any snow in the mountains, or rivers upon
land, or waters in the seas, or clouds in the skies, when the world is
old, and the sun burned out, and time grows weary, I shall love you
still, always and forever. What is it all about, love?" He clasped her
close, and did not answer at once. "Don't you know that old Irish
troth," he said, "which would have been enough, even in that hard,
unromantic world of ours, to have made you legally my wife, if said
over any Scottish stream? I thought you knew; you are sure I would not
trick you? You know I could not?" He put her head back on his shoulder
and looked into her shining eyes. It seemed to him he could not bear
even a look of reproach. She raised her hands almost as if she were
placing an invisible crown upon his head, and let her arms fall about
his shoulders.

"Then I am your wife while living water runs?"

"Forever and forever," he replied.

"Oh, wait, wait just a little," she answered.

XVI

All persons possessing any portion of power ought to be
strongly and awfully impressed with an idea that they act in
trust, and that they are to account for their conduct in
that trust to the one great Master, Author, and Founder of
society.

BURKE.

Adam found a note beside his plate in the morning. "I will be back
before five o'clock," it said; "I must think." He did not sit down to
the table she had spread for him, but called the dogs; Prince was
missing, and this was a relief to him. Nothing could happen to her
when Prince was with her. His first impulse was to follow her, but he
repelled it, and he too sat down to think. Lassie whined uneasily, and
he stroked her head absent-mindedly, and finally went out and tried to
work. The hours dragged away, and by four o'clock he could stand it no
longer. He went to the gateway. As he unfastened it, he saw her coming
toward him, but she stopped and he joined her, and together they
turned back to the boulder. He noticed that she was very white, and
that her eyes looked as if she had not slept, but he only said, "Have
you thought?"

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