“It was a fine end for the criminal,” was Alistair’s comment.
His mind presented him with two contrasted pictures—the felon of civilization, in his dreadful garb, numbered and branded like a chattel, drudging in the stone quarries under the warder’s eye; and that sufferer of the antique world, drawn out of some fetid Eastern gaol, clad in the royal robe and crown, and marched in solemn priest-led procession to the top of a Syrian hill to be put to death for the salvation of the people. The sin-bearer, the redeemer—surely every criminal was such! “Don’t you see,” he said suddenly to the astonished anthropologist, “that they were right? They were simply saying what modern science is saying, only they said it far more beautifully. The criminal is the sin-bearer; he is crucified for the good of the people even to-day. He is imprisoned and hanged that our lives and purses may be safe. By his stripes we are healed.”
Sir Bernard Vanbrugh told his daughter that night that he was a little disappointed in Lord Alistair.
“He is brilliant enough in his own way,” was the scientist’s verdict, “but not practical. I am afraid he is a dreamer.”
It was the dreamer that Hero loved.
CHAPTER XVII
A SPOKE IN THE WHEEL
The assurance that Hero loved him was not conveyed to Alistair in words. It stole in upon him like faint scents rising from the earth after a shower, and thrilled him almost unawares.
The note of passion was overlaid by higher and more intricate harmonies. In Hero’s thoughts of Alistair there was a protecting tenderness, like a mother’s for a child that has suffered some hurt; and in Alistair’s thoughts of her there was a reverence and spiritual yearning that made it seem profane to offer her the common coin of love.
When he sat beside her on some lonely stretch of sand or grass-clad promontory, and saw the sea reflected in her eyes, like the star in the wine-cup of Hafiz, he shrank instinctively from the thoughts that other women had roused in him. For the first time he saw into the mind of the ascetic, and shared its rebellion against Nature—Nature that roots the flower of life in earth. A silence often fell on him in Hero’s presence. He dreaded certain stages on the way in front of them, and wished that they could have fallen asleep together, and waked up man and wife.
The marriage of true minds, so rare and so desirable, made formal marriage vulgar. There was something impossible in that astounding ceremony by which society revealed its strain of primitive savagery. How could a man and woman, sensitive to beautiful things, their hearts vibrating with the awful music of creation, prank themselves out like negroes at a fair, and march into a public building to advertise mankind of what they were about to do? The marriage of true minds did not admit impediments like these.