Idolatry: Chapter 29
Chapter 29
A CHAMBER OF THE HEART.
Manetho neither sank through the granite floor, nor ascended in the
smoke of the lamp. He unlocked a door (to the panels of which the
clock was affixed, and which it concealed) and let himself into his
private study, a room scarce seven feet wide, though corresponding in
length and height with the dimensions of the outer temple. Books and
papers were kept here, and such other things of a private or valuable
nature as Manetho wished should be inaccessible to outsiders. Against
the wall opposite the door stood a heavy mahogany table; beside it, a
deep-bottomed chair, in which the priest now sat down.
The room was destitute of windows, properly so called. The walls were
full twenty feet high; and at a distance of some sixteen feet from the
floor, a series of low horizontal apertures pierced the masonry,
allowing the light of heaven to penetrate in an embarrassed manner,
and hesitatingly to reveal the interior. Viewed from without, these
narrow slits would be mistaken for mere architectural indentations. To
the inhabitant they were of more importance, contracted though they
were; and albeit one could not look out of them, they served as
ventilators, and to distinguish between fine and cloudy weather.
In his earlier and more active days, Manetho had lived and worked
throughout the whole extent of this study, and it had been kept clean
and orderly to its remotest corner. But as years passed, and the range
of his sympathies and activities narrowed, the ends of the room had
gradually fallen into dusty neglect, till at length only the small
space about the chair and table was left clear and available. The rest
was impeded by books, instruments of science, and endless chaotic
rubbish; while spiders had handed down their ever-broadening estates
from father to child, through innumerable Araneid�an generations. A
gray uniformity had thus come to overspread everything; and with the
exceptions of a cracked celestial globe, and the end of a worm-eaten
old ladder, there was nothing to catch the attention.
Here might the Egyptian indulge himself in whatever extravagances of
word or act he chose, secure from sight or hearing; and here had he
spent many an hour in such solitary exercises as no sane mind can
conceive. To him the room was thick with associations. Here had he
pursued his studies, or helped the Doctor in his erratic experiments
and research; here, with Helen in his thoughts, he had shaped out a
career,--not all of Christian humility and charity, perhaps, but at
least unstained by positive sin, and not unmindful of domestic
happiness. Here, again, had Salome visited him, bringing discord and
delight in equal parts; for at times, with the strong heat of youth,
he had vowed to love only her and to forsake ambition; and anon the
bloodless counsels of worldly power and welfare banished her with a
curse for having crossed his path. Head and heart were always at war
in Manetho. The talismanic diamond flashed or waned, and fiercely
wriggled the little fighting serpents.
At length Thor Helwyse's gauntlet was thrown into the ring; and
peace--if still present to outward seeming--abode not in the feverish
soul of the Egyptian. But it was his nature to dissemble. In this room
he had often outwatched the night, chewing the cud of his wrongs,
invoking vengeance upon the thwarter of his hopes, and swearing
through his teeth to even the balance between them. The black serpent
held the golden one helpless in his coils. The obtuse Doctor,
blundering in at morning, would find his adopted son with pallid
cheeks and glittering eyes, but ever ready with a smile and pleasant
greeting, obedience and help. Hiero Glyphic, however wayward and
cross-grained, never had cause to censure this creature of his,--to
remind him that he might have been food for crocodiles.
Manetho's dissimulation was almost without flaw. Even Helen, whose
fancy had played with him at first, but who in time had indolently
yielded to the fascination exerted over her, and even gone so far as
to permit his adulation, and accept in the ring the mystic pledge
thereof (during all the countless ages of its experience it had never
touched woman's hand before),--even she, when her lazy heart and
overbearing spirit were at length aroused and quelled by the voice
rather of a master than suitor, was deceived by forsaken Manetho's
unruffled face, gentle voice, and downcast eyes. She told herself that
his love had never dared be warmer than a kind of worship, like that
of a pagan for his idol, apart from human passion; such, at all
events, had been her understanding of his attentions. As to the ring,
it had been tendered as an offering at the shrine of abstract
womanhood; to return it too soon would imply a supposition of more
personal sentiment. Neither must Thor see it, however; his rough sense
would fail to appreciate her fine-drawn distinction. So she concealed
it in her bosom, and Manetho's serpents were ever between Thor and his
wife's heart. She was false both to husband and lover.
Great Thor, meanwhile, pitied the slender Egyptian, and in a kindly
way despised him, with his supple manners, quiet words, and religious
studies. To the young priest's timid yet earnest request for
permission to pronounce the marriage-service of him and his bride,
Thor assented with gruff heartiness.
"Marry us? Of course! marry us as fast as you can, if it gives you any
pleasure, my friend of the crocodile. A good beginning for your
ministerial career,--marrying a couple who love each other as much as
Nell and I do. Eh, Nellie?"
The ceremony over, Manetho had retired to his study, and there passed
the night,--their marriage-night! What words and tones, what twistings
of face and body, did those passionless walls see and hear? How the
smooth, studious, submissive priest yearned for power to work his will
for one day! And as the cool, still morning sheared the lustre from
his lamp-flame, how desolate he felt, with his hatred and despair and
blaspheming rage! Evil passions are but poor company, in the early
morning.
But was not Salome left him? The only sincerely tender words he had
ever spoken to woman had been said to her: his humblest and happiest
thoughts had been born of their early acquaintance,--before he had
raised his eyes to the proud and languid mistress. Yet on her only did
the evil passions of Manetho wreak themselves in harm and wrong; her
only, on a later day, did he dastardly strike down. Poor Salome had
given him her heart. These walls had seen their meetings.
Years afterwards, Manetho had here embalmed his foster-father:
through long hours had he labored at his hateful task, with curious
zest and conscientiousness. As regarded the strange place of
sepulture, the Egyptian had perhaps imagined a symbolic fitness in
enclosing his human immortal in the empty shell of time. Over this
matter of Hiero Glyphic's death and burial, however, must ever brood a
cloud of mystery. Undoubtedly Manetho loved the man,--but death was
not always the worst of ills in Manetho's philosophy.
The clock had been affixed to the study door both as an additional
concealment, and possibly as a congenial sentry over the interior
associations. Since then the place had become the clergyman's almost
daily resort. Pacing the contracted floor, sitting moodily in the
chair,--many a brooding hour had gone over his barrenly busy head, and
written its darkening record in his book of life. Here had been
schemed that plan of revenge, whose insanity the insane schemer could
not perceive. Nor could he understand that mightier powers than he
could master worked against him, and even used his efforts to bring
forth contrary results.
But not all hours had passed so. Spaces there had been wherein evil
counsels had retired to a cloudy background, athwart which had
brightened a rainbow, intangible, whose source was hidden, but whose
colors were true before his eyes. The grace and aerial beauty of
sunshine lightened through the rain,--the pleasing loveliness of
essential life was projected on the gloom of evil imaginations. For
Manetho's actual deeds were apt to be prompted by far gentler
influences than governed his theories. The man was better than his
mind: and goodness, perhaps, bears an absolute blessing; insomuch that
the sinner, doing ignorant good, yet feels the benefit thereof; just
as the rain, however dismal, cannot prevent the sun from making
rainbows out of it.
On this particular morning Manetho sank into his deep-seated chair,
and was quite still. A great part of what had hitherto made his daily
life ended here. The activity of existence was over for him. Thought,
feeling, hope, could live hereafter only as phantoms of memory. But to
look back on evil done is not so pleasant as to plan it; the dead body
of a foe moves us in another way than his living hostile person.
When, therefore, Manetho should have hurled to its mark the
long-poised spear, he would have little to look forward to. That one
moment of triumph must repay, both for what had been and was to come.
To-day of all his days, then, must each sense and faculty be in
exquisite condition. Unseasonably enough, however, he found himself in
a perversely dull and callous state. Could Providence so cajole him as
to mar the only joyful hour of his life! Then better off than he were
savages, who could destroy their recusant idols. But nothing short of
spiritual suicide would have destroyed the idol of Manetho!
He was wearing to-day the same priestly robe which he had put on when,
for the first and last time, he performed a ministerial duty. In this
robe had he married Helen to Thor. Itself a precious relic of
antiquity, it had once dignified the shoulders of a contemporary of
Manetho's remotest ancestors. Old Hiero Glyphic had counted it amongst
his chiefest treasures; and on his sister's wedding-day had produced
it from its repository, insisting that the minister should wear it
instead of the orthodox sacerdotal costume. Since then it had lain
untouched till to-day.
Manetho brooded over the dim magnificence of its folds, sitting amidst
the cobwebbed rubbish, a narrow glint of sunshine creeping
slope-downwards from the crevice above his head. He smoothed the
fabric abstractedly with his hand, recalling the thoughts and scenes
of four-and-twenty years ago.
"I joined them in the holy bonds of matrimony,--read over them that
service, those sacred words heavy with solemn benediction. Rich,
smooth, softly modulated was my voice, missing not one just emphasis
or melodious intonation. Ah! had they seen my soul. But my eyes were
half closed like the crocodile's, yet never losing sight of the two I
was uniting in sight of God and man. The Devil too was there. He
turned the blessings my lips uttered into blighting curses, that fell
on the happy couple like pestilential rain!
"Laughable! Covered head to foot with curses, and felt them not! All
was smiles, blushes, happiness, forward-looking to a long, joyful
future. They knelt before me; I uplifted my hands and invoked the last
blessing,--the final curse! My heart burned, and the smoke of its fire
enveloped bride and groom, fouling his yellow beard, and smirching her
silvery veil; shutting out heaven from their prayers, and blackening
their path before them. They neither felt nor knew. They kissed,--I
saw their lips meet,--as Balder and Gnulemah to-day. Then I covered my
face and seemed to be in prayer!
"Gnulemah,--I hate her!--yes, but hatred sometimes touches the heart
like love. I love her!--to marry her? Woe to him who becomes her
husband! As a daughter?--no daughter is she of mine!--I hate her,
then.
"Why am I childless?--how would I have loved a child! I would have
left all else to love my child! I would have been the one father in
the world! My life should have been full of love as it has been of
hate. Why did not God send me a wife and a daughter?"
Men's ears have grown deaf to any save the most commonplace oracles.
But there is ever a warning voice for who will listen. One may object
that its language is unknown, or its whisper inaudible; but to the
question, "Whence your ignorance and deafness?" what shall be the
answer?
In Manetho's case it appears to have been the venerable robe that took
on itself the task of remonstrance.
"You are unreasonable, friend," it interposed with a gentle rustle.
"Gnulemah, if not your daughter, might, however, have stood you in
place of one; and she would have done you just as much good, in the
way of softening and elevating your nature, as though she had been the
issue of your own loins. You have turned the milk and honey of your
life into gall and wormwood; and I wish I could feel sure that only
you would get the benefit of it!"
The reproof had as well been spared; it is doubtful whether the
culprit heard so much as a word of it. His reverie rambled on.
"Keen,--that Balder! he half suspects me. Had I not so hurried him to
a conclusion, he would have questioned me too closely. He shall know
all presently, even as I promised him!--shall hear a sounder guess at
Gnulemah's genealogy than was made to-day.
"Do I love her?--only as the means to my end! The end once gained, I
shall hate her as I do him. But not yet,--and therefore must I love
him as well as her. They shall be, to-day, my beloved children!
To-morrow,--how shall I endure till to-morrow,--all the night
through? O Gnulemah!--
"They love each other well,--seem made to make each other happy; yet
have they come together from the ends of the earth to be each other's
curse! Only if I keep silence might it be otherwise, for love might
tame the devil that I have bred in Gnulemah. Even now she seems more
angel than devil!--Am I mad?"
He straightened himself in his chair, and glanced up towards the
crevice whence slanted the dusty sunshine. The old robe took the
opportunity to deliver its final warning.
"Not yet mad beyond remedy, Manetho; but you look up too seldom at the
sunshine, and brood too often over your own dusty depths. You have had
no consciously unselfish thought during the last quarter of a century.
You eat, drink, and breathe only Manetho! This room is yours, because
it is fullest of rubbish, and least looks out upon the glorious
universe. Break down your walls! take broom in hand without delay!
Proclaim at once the crime you meditate. Go! there is still sunshine
in this dust-hole of yours, and more of heaven in every man than he
himself dreams of. The sun is passing to the other side. Go while it
shines!"
But Manetho's dull ears heard not; and the aged garment of truth spoke
no more.
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