The way of the spirit

by H. Rider Haggard

This, then, was their marriage, there amidst the desert sands and beneath the desert stars, which they felt even then were less eternal than the troth they plighted; as it proved, the strangest and yet the happiest and most blessed marriage that ever was celebrated between man and woman—or so they came to think.

For are we not perchance befooled and blind? Driven by impulses that we did not create, but which are necessary to our creation, we follow after the flesh, and therefrom often garner bitterness, who, were our eyes opened, should pursue the spirit and win a more abiding joy which it alone can give. Yet perhaps it was not decreed that this should be so; perhaps in its day, for ends whereof we know nothing, the flesh was meant to be our master, to rule us, as the spirit shall rule in its appointed kingdom. Who can say?

At least, this is certain; these two escaped to the borderland of that kingdom, though not without difficulty, backward looks, and struggling. There, before the time, they dwelt together in such content and satisfaction as are known to few, gazing forward, ever gazing forward, to the day when, as they believed, they should enter hand-in-hand upon an heritage glorious and eternal, and from the bitter seed of self-denial, planted in pain and watered with secret tears, should reap such a golden harvest and wreathe themselves with such white, immortal flowers as the rich soil of passion cannot bear, nor can the flesh hope to equal with its reward of fading, evil-odoured poppies.

For in that cruellest hour of his life, that hour of bereavement, of spittings and of scourgings, when he looked with longing at the grey waters of the river, and they showed him Mea’s face, though he did not know it then, was born the pure happiness which Rupert had lived to reach. Never was Edith so kind to him as in that last act of utter faithlessness, for at her side all that was best in him must have withered, all that was weak and worldly must have increased. She took from him herself, but she gave him Mea. She deprived him of the world in which he was bred, with its false glitter and falser civilisation, its venomous strivings for victory bought with the heart’s blood of those that fall, its mad lust for rank and wealth and precedence to be won by any means and kept as best they might, till, like broken toys, Time swept them and their holders to its dust-heap. But in place of these she gave him the wilderness and its beaconing stars—she gave him what all of us so sorely need, time to reflect upon the eternal verities of our being, time to repent his sins before he was called upon to give account of them. Yes, when Edith took from him the fever of the earth, she gave to him a foretaste of the peace that passeth understanding.

Rupert was led to the camp in the mouth of the Black Pass, and there received with waving of lances, with shoutings and with honour; very different greetings, he could not help reflecting, to those that had awaited him in his native city on the Thames, which is so mighty and multitudinous that kings may pass and leave it untroubled; the city where even the most distinguished human item hardly counts. That night he ate with Mea and Bakhita, and after the latter had gone to see about the setting of his tent, he told Mea all his story from the beginning, keeping nothing back, not even his first fault as a lad, for he felt that the confidence between them should be complete. She listened in silence, till he came to the tale of all he had suffered upon that awful Sunday in London, and of how his wife had rejected him, praying him to “remain dead.” Then Mea’s indignation broke out.

“I ought to give her thanks,” she said, “yet here we should kill that woman. Say now, Rupert Bey, had this other man you tell of, your cousin, had he been with her?”

“How can I know?” answered Rupert. “But it is true that a glove such as he used to wear lay upon the table, and a man had been smoking in the room that day.”

“I thought as much,” she answered, “for otherwise she had spoken to you differently; although, of course, you were no longer rich and great, and with such women that changes the face of things.”

“My wife would not disgrace herself,” said Rupert proudly.

“Your wife had no husband then—you were a dead man,” she answered.