Lying Prophets: A Novel

by Eden Phillpotts

"Strange," he reflected, "that her mediocre intelligence should have clung to a man so outwardly mean as myself. If I thought that she had remembered half I said when I was with her, or had made a single attempt to practice the gospel I preached so finely—damned if I wouldn't have her back again to-morrow and be proud of her too. But it can't be. She was such an absolute fool. No, I much fear she only desires to find out what has become of the goose who laid the big golden egg. Or if she doesn't, perhaps her God-fearing father and mother do."

Which opinion is not uninteresting, for it illustrates the usual failure of materialism to discover or gauge those mental possibilities which lie hidden within the humblest and worst equipped intelligences. John Barron was an able man in some respects, but his knowledge of Joan Tregenza had taught him nothing concerning her character and its latent powers of development.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

DISENCHANTMENT

With summer, Nature, proceeding on her busy way, approached again the annual phenomena of seed-time and harvest. To Joan, as spring had brought with it a world of mothers, so the subsequent season filled Nature with babies; and, in the light of all this newborn life, the mothers suffered a change. Now, sorrow-guided, did Joan begin to read under the face of things, "to get behind the sunset," as Barren had said in his letter to Murdoch, to realize a little of the mystery hidden in green leaves and swelling fruits and ripening grain, to observe at least the presence of mystery though she could not translate more than an occasional manifestation thereof. She found much matter for wonder and for fear. Visible Nature had grown to be a smiling curtain behind which raged eternal struggles for life. Every leaf sheltered a tragedy, every bough was a battlefield. The awful frailty of all existence began to dawn upon Joan Tregenza, and the discovery left her helpless, lonely, longing for new gods. She knew not where to turn. Any brightness from any source had been welcome then.

Disenchantment came with the second visit of the artist to the stream. There; young Murdoch had met her and told her that "Mister Jan" was going to write her a letter. Upon which she had sung glad songs in a sunlit world and amazed Mary and Uncle Chirgwin alike by the exhibition of a sudden and profound happiness. But that longed-for letter never came; weeks passed by; the truth rolled up over her life at last; and, as a world seen in a blaze of sunshine only dazzles us and conceals its facts under too much light, but reveals the same clear cut and distinct at dawn or early twilight, so now Joan's eyes, obscured no more by the blinding promise of great joy, began to see her world as it was, her future as it would be.

Strange thoughts came to her on an evening when she stood by the door of the kitchen at Drift, waiting for the cart to return from market. It was a cool, gray gloaming, wreathed in diaphanous mists born of past ram. These rendered every outline of tree and building vague and immense. Where Joan stood, the peace of the time was broken only by a gentle dripping from the leaves of a great laurel by the gate which led from the farmyard to the fields. Below it, moist ground was stamped with the trident impress of many fowls' feet; and, now and then, a feather sidled down from the heart of the evergreen, where poultry, black and white and spangled, were settling to roost. A subdued clucking and fluttering marked their hidden perches; then came showers of rain-drops from the shining leaves as a bird mounted to a higher branch; after which silence fell again.

And Joan found all hope fairly dead at last. There and then, in the misty eveningtide, the fact fell on the ear of her heart as though one had spoken it; and henceforth she dated disenchantment from that hour. The whole pageant of her romance, with the knightly figure of the painter that filled its foreground, shriveled to a scroll no bigger than a curled, dead leaf—sere, wasted, ghostly, and light enough to be washed away on a tear, borne away upon a sigh.

Then there followed for her prodigious transformations in the panorama of Nature. Seen from the standpoint of his great, overwhelming lie to her, the philosophy which this man had professed changed in its appearance, and that mightily. He had used his cleverness like a net to trap her, and now, though she could not prove his words untrue save in one particular, yet that crowning act of faithlessness much tended to vitiate all the beauties of imagination which had gone before it. They were lilies grown from a dung-heap. Looking back in the new cold sidelight, her life came out clearly with all the color gone from it and the remorseless details distinct. And in this survey Nature dwindled to a minor Deity, a goddess with moods as many and whims as wild as a woman's. She was unstable, it seemed to Joan then; the immemorial solidity and splendor of her had departed; her eyes were not fixed on Heaven any more, nor did peace any longer rest within them; they were frightened, terrified, and their wild and furtive glances followed one Shadow, reflected one Shape. It stood waiting at the end of all her avenues; It peered from the heart of her forests; it wandered on her heaths and moors; it lay under the stones in her rivers; it stalked her sea-shores, floated on her waves, rode upon her lightning, hid in her four winds; and the Shadow's name was Death. Joan stood face to face with it at last and gazed round-eyed at a revelation. She was saddened to find her own story told by Nature in many allegories, painted upon the garden, set forth in waste places, fashioned by humble weeds, reflected in the small, brief lives of unconsidered creatures. Now she imagined herself an ill-shaped apple in the orchard which the mother of all had neglected. It was crumpled up on one side, twisted out of its fair full beauty, ruined by some wicked influence—a failure. Now she was a fly caught by the gold spider who set his web shaking to deceive. Now she was a little bird singing one moment, the next crawling dazed and shaking under the paw of a cat. Why should Nature make the strong her favorites and be so cruel to the weak? That seemed an ungodly thing to Joan. She had only reached this point. She had no inkling of the great cleansing process which removes the dross, the eternal competition from which only the cleanest and sweetest and best come forth first. She saw the battle indeed, but did not understand the meaning of it any more than the rest of the world which, in the words of the weakling Barren, beneath the emblems of a false humanity, keeps its weeds under hot-house glasses and, out of mercy to futile individuals, does terribly wrong its communities. Our cleansing processes are only valuable so far as they go hand in hand with Nature, and where the folly of many fools rejects the wisdom of the wise, there Nature has her certain revenge sooner or later. The sins of the State are visited on the children of the State, and those who repeal laws which Science, walking hand in hand with Nature, has proposed, those who refuse laws which Science, Nature-taught, urges upon Power, do not indeed suffer themselves, but commit thousands of others to suffering. So their false sentiment in effect poisons the blood-springs of a nation. Religion leads to these disasters, and any religion answerable for gigantic human follies is either false or most falsely comprehended.

Her uncle still tarried, and Joan, weary of waiting, betook herself and her sorrows to the old garden, there to view a spectacle which she never tired of. She watched the evening primroses, saw their green bud-cases spring open and the soft yellow leaves tremble out like butterflies new come from the chrysalis. She loved these little lemon-colored lamps that twinkled anew at every sundown in the green twilight of the garden. She knew their eyes would watch through the night and that their reward would be death. Many shriveled fragments marked the old blossoms on the long stems, but the crowns of each still put out new buds, and every dusk saw the wakening of fresh blossoms heedless of their dead sisters below. "They was killed 'cause they looked at the sun," thought Joan. "I suppose the moon be theer mistress and they should not chaange their god. Yet it do seem hard like to be scorched to death for lookin' upward."