“Ho! You don't say!”
“I'm a voice in the wilderness crying: The kingdom of God is lost, strayed, and stolen. Help me find my brother.”
But they did not find him.
Such was the outward story of Alcott Aidee.
But the outward story of a man is the wind-blown rippled surface of him. The current and true action are below. How can it be told? There was a love lying between two brothers, unreasoning and indomitable, which followed them up through their zigzag careers, and left with the elder a burden and a bleeding sore. There was some maze of impulse, impatience, and remorse, out of whose dusky tangle it arose that Allen cut himself loose like a broken spar. Who shall pick the tangle apart? “Evil and good may be better or worse,” but the “mixture of each is a marvel,” says the penetrative poet. Why a marvel? Not from the strangeness of unuse, if they came so unmixed in the use and custom of things. Remorse there was, and irritated impatience, in Allen, no doubt.
“The Inner Republic,” wrote Alcott afterwards in the grey volume of that title, “has this peril to its liberties, that love there tends to become a tyranny.”
In Alcott's long thirst after knowledge, and his midnight studies, it is certain that something peculiar in his own nature lit the pages before him, with another light than that of his dim oil lamp. In the same grey volume, which troubled Henry Champney with premonitions, we read, near the beginning of Chapter XVIII., entitled “Light”: “Two lamps have mainly given me what light I have. I suppose many men, if not every man, has known them. One seemed to shine from overhead, a hanging flicker becoming a larger glow,—the Lamp of Knowledge. There are no better moments than when its flame leaps at the opening of a new vista. The other has seemed to rise out of the deeps beneath me, out of anger and brooding and pain, and by it I hope to find my brother in my neighbour. Two lamps—the Lamp of Knowledge, and the Lamp of Sorrow.”
So the Seton Avenue Hall was built, and thronged now with a shifting multitude. It was a time, a land, and a section of many an undenominated thing. Many a religious or social movement started up impulsively, and died on the spot without going beyond its seed bed. Some were hardier and more fertile, some curious, some famous, and some are with us still.
“Classifications of men are all false,” declared Aidee. “Everyone is an elemental unit.”
If he had a mind to be ignorant of whether he was clerical or not, and to care less, to be indifferent to all names that were applied to him, Port Argent had no call to be wiser. T. M. Secor was said to be backing the Assembly. In that case he would be apt to set up something in opposition next, and gamble on both sides. Aidee presently fell tooth and nail on local politics, and Port Argent saw a solution of the mystery.