I write now to express the sincere hope that if, as I believe, you are still living, you and Edith, forgetting your previous diversities, and many another trouble and sorrow, will agree to live together in the accustomed, time-hallowed fashion, and if possible leave children behind you to carry on the race. Not that it is worth carrying on, except, perhaps, for certain qualities of your own, but one must make sacrifices upon the altars of habit and sentiment. For what other possible reason can the populations of the earth be continued? Yet there is one—Nature—(perhaps in the wilderness you have found out what that word means)—commands what the good sense of her most cultivated children condemns as entirely useless and undesirable. Perhaps there is some ultimate object in this, though personally I can see none. To me it appears to be nothing more than a part of the blind brutality of things which decrees the continuance, at any rate for a little while, of the highly nervous, overbred and unsatisfactory animal called Man. Well, soon or late he will die of his own sufferings, that increase daily as he advances in the scale of progressive degeneracy, which he dignifies by the name of civilisation. Then perhaps Nature (God is your name for it) will enjoy a good laugh over the whole affair, but as human tears will have ceased to fall, what will that matter?
Edith will tell you of the fashion of my end; how, worn out at length by grief—one of the worst gifts of the said civilisation, for the savage feels little—and bodily weakness—the worst gift of our primeval state, I have determined to put an end to both, though this is a fact which there is no need for you to blazon abroad.
I can see you solemnly lifting your eyes and saying: ‘Lo! a judgment. What the man drove that unfortunate woman to has fallen back upon his own head. (Under the circumstances “unfortunate” is the exact word that you will use, tempered by a romantic sigh, whereas, in fact, poor Clara was but a very ordinary and middle-class kind of sinner, who did not even shrink from the ruin of the boy whom she pretended to love.) How wonderful is the retribution of Providence! The same death, the same means of death!’
Well, you will be quite wrong. Whether one suffers from sleeplessness or from the fear of intolerable exposure does not matter. One takes the most convenient method to end it, and in this case they happen to be identical. There is no Providence, no poetic justice about the business, nothing but what novelists, or rather their critics, call the ‘long arm of coincidence.’
Good-bye! I wonder what you have been doing all these years in the Soudan. I should like to hear the story from you; I am sure that it must be interesting. But I am quite convinced that I shall never have the chance. Nothing is absolutely certain except the absolute nothingness that awaits us all.—Believe me, my dear Devene, yours more sincerely than you may think,
Devene.
“What an odd letter,” thought Edith, as she returned the sheets to their envelope. “I don’t quite understand all of it, but I think that under other circumstances my father might have been a very different man. I wonder if we are quite responsible for what we do, or if the circumstances are responsible? If so, who makes the circumstances?”
CHAPTER XXI.
ZAHED
Rupert was disturbed in his mind. No one was less superstitious. He had advanced spiritually beyond the reach of superstition. He had grasped the great fact still not understood by the vast majority of human beings, that the universe and their connection with it is a mighty mystery whereof nine hundred and ninety-nine parts out of a thousand are still veiled to men. These are apt to believe, as Lord Devene believed, that this thousandth part which they see bathed in the vivid, daily sunlight is all that there is to see. They imagine that because only one tiny angle of the great jewel catches and reflects the light, the rest must be dark and valueless. They look upon the point of rock showing above the ocean and forget that in its secret depths lies hid a mountain range, an island, a continent, a world, perhaps, whereof this topmost peak alone appears.
With Rupert, to whom such reflections were familiar, it was not so. Yet perhaps, because he remembered that every outward manifestation, however trivial, doubtless has its root in some hidden reason, and that probably the thing we call coincidence does not in truth exist, it did trouble and even alarm him when, riding one morning with Mea down a deep cleft in Tama, he heard upon the cliff, to the right of them, the wild and piercing music of the Wandering Players. Looking up, he saw upon the edge of that cliff those strange musicians, swathed as before in such a fashion that their faces were invisible, three of them blowing on their pipes and two keeping time with the drums, for the benefit, apparently, of the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth, since no biped was near to them.