"But fire ought to," she put in. "It's the most powerful and splendid, the most terrific of them all. Isn't it? It regenerates. It purifies. I love fire——"
Her father smiled in his beard, noticing the softness in her manner, rather than in her voice. The awakening in her he had long since understood sympathetically, if more profoundly than she knew, and welcomed.
"He won't hurt you, child. He won't harm Nayushka any more than a summer's day can hurt her. I see him thus sometimes," he mumbled on half to himself, though she heard and stored the words in her memory; "as an entire day, a landscape even, I often see him. A stretch of being rather than a point; a rushing stream rather than a single isolated wave harnessed and confined in definite form—as we understand being here," he added curiously. "No, he'll neither harm nor help you," he went on; "nor any of us for that matter. A dozen nations, a planet, a star he might help or harm"—he laughed aloud suddenly in a startled way at his own language—"but an individual never!" And he abruptly took her in his arms and kissed her, drying her tears with his own rough handkerchief. "Not even a fire-worshipper," he added with gruff tenderness, "like you!"
"There's more of divinity in fire than in any other earthly thing we know," she replied as he held her, "for it takes into itself the sweetest essence of all it touches." She looked up at him with a smile. "That's why you can't get it into your marble perhaps." To which her father made the significant rejoinder: "And because none of us has the least conception what 'divine' and 'divinity' really mean, though we're always using the words! It's odd, anyhow," he finished reflectively, "that I can model the fellow better from memory than when he's standing there before my eyes. At close quarters he confuses me with too many terrific unanswerable questions."
To multiply the verdicts and impressions Fillery jotted down is unnecessary. In his own way he collected; in his own way he wrote them down. About "N. H.," all agreed in their various ways of expressing it, was that vital suggestion of agelessness, of deathlessness, of what men call eternal youth: the vigorous grace of limbs and movements, the deep simple joy of confidence and power. None could picture him tired, or even wearing out, yet ever with a faint hint of painful conflict due to immense potentialities—"a day compressed into a single minute," as Khilkoff phrased it—straining, but vainly, to express themselves through a limited form that was inadequate to their use. A storm of passionate hope and wonder seemed ever ready to tear forth from behind the calm of the great quiet eyes, those green-blue changing eyes, which none could imagine lightless or unlamping; and about his whole presentment a surplus of easy, overflowing energy from an inexhaustible source pressing its gifts down into him spontaneously, fire and wind its messengers; yet that the human machinery using these—mind, body, nerves—was ill adapted to their full expression. To every individual having to do with him was given a push, a drive, an impetus that stimulated that individual's chief characteristic, intensifying it.
This to imaginative and discerning sight. But even upon ordinary folk, aware only of the surface things that deliberately hit them, was left a startling impression as of someone waving a strange, unaccustomed banner that made them halt and stare before passing on—uncomfortably. He had that nameless quality, apart from looks or voice or manner, which arrested attention and drew the eyes of the soul, wonderingly, perhaps uneasily, upon itself. He left a mark. Something defined him from all others, leaving him silhouetted in the mind, and those who had looked into his eyes could not forget that they had done so. Up rose at once the great unanswerable questions that, lying ever at the back of daily life, the majority find it most comfortable to leave undisturbed—but rose in red ink or italics. He started into an awareness of greater life. And the effect remained, was greatest even, after he had passed on.
It was, of course, Father Collins, a frequent caller now at the Home, betraying his vehement interest in long talks with Dr. Fillery and in what interviews with "N. H." the latter permitted him—it was this protean being whose mind, amid wildest speculations, formed the most positive conclusions. The Prometheans, he believed, were not far wrong in their instinctive collective judgment. "N. H." was not a human being; the occupant of that magnificent body was not a human spirit like the rest of us.
"Nor is he the only one walking the streets to-day," he affirmed mysteriously. "In shops and theatres, trains and buses, tucked in among the best families," he laughed, although in earnest, "and even in suburbia I have come across other human bodies similarly inhabited. What they are and where they come from exactly, we cannot know, but their presence among us is indubitable."
"You mean you recognize them?" inquired Dr. Fillery calmly.