"I am an eater of sin. We still have a few such in Wales. They put a piece of bread and cheese on the breast of a dead man and when the sin-eater eats it, the sins of the dead are passed into the bread and cheese and the soul of the dead is shrived of them. Ay, ay, but it's a grave duty, my friend, to take upon your own soul the crime of another. If you are free from sin yourself, you may walk through life a brave creature; but ... I took his sins, sins, the sins of the wickedest composer of our century, God rest his soul. And for the wicked things he put into his symphonies I must march through life playing on this terrible collection of instruments the Tune of Time—" His daughter faced him.
"Father, we must go; you are only keeping the gentleman." Again she signalled Ferval, but he disregarded her warning. He would not stir. The story and the man who told it, a prophet shorn of his heaven-storming powers, fascinated him.
"I took his sins to myself and they were awful. Once every night I play the Tune of Time in which the wickedness of the dead man is spread out like dry rot in a green field. This man kept his genius so long stagnant that it decayed on his hands, and then into his pestilential music he poured his poison, and would have made the world sick. Oh, for delivery from the crushing transgressions of another! His name? Ah, but that is my secret! I ate his sin, and truth, my son, is stranger than theology! Listen!"
Before his daughter could check him he had hastily donned his armament of instruments and, tramping slowly the broad, smooth path, began playing. Ferval, much disappointed, was about to disappear, for he remembered the racking noises of the previous day. But this music, this Tune of Time!...
III
It was like the flare of lightning which illuminates strange regions beyond the borders of the soul. Ferval no longer heard, he felt; he felt no more, he saw. The white veil was torn asunder, and it showed him a melodious thunder-pool wherein tapering tiny bodies swam, whose eyes were the eyes of Debora. They split and coalesced into other creatures, and to the drummings of spheric harmonies resolved themselves scaly and monstrous. Never did they cease changing. As the music buzzed he saw the great ladder of life, the lowermost rungs resting in lakes of melted amber, the top threatening the remotest rims of the universe. And still the Tune of Time whirred on, as facet after facet of the Infinite wheeled toward creation. Numberless legions of crumpled nightmare shapes modulated into new, familiar forms. Ferval saw plasmic dew become anthropoidal apes, fiercely roaming primeval forests in search of prey. The music mounted ever upward, for the Tune of Time is the Tune of Love—love and its inseparable shadow, hate, fashion the firmament. The solid, circular earth shivered like a mighty harp under this lyric burden of love. The very stars sported in their orbits; and from the fulgurating ovens of the Milky Way there shot forth streams of audible light that touched the heart-strings of the hairy, erect primates and set them chanting; thus were the souls born which crowned them men. This space-bridging music ranged from sun to sun, and its supernatural symphony had no beginning and never shall end.
But the magician or devil who revealed this phantasmagoria of the Cosmos—how had he wrested from the Inane the Tune of Time that in a sequence of chromatic chords pictured the processes of the eternal energy? Was this his sin, the true sin against the Holy Ghost? How had he blundered upon the secret of the rhythmic engine which spun souls through the ages? No man could live after this terrific peep at the Ancient of Days. Debora's eyes peered into Ferval's, filled with the music that enmeshes. And now sounded the apocalyptic trumpets even unto the glittering edges of eternity....
Amid this vertiginous tempest of tones Debora danced the Dance of Space. She revolved in lenten movement to the lilt of the music, her eyes staring and full of broken lights. As her gaze collided with her companion's he saw a disk of many-coloured fire; and then her languorous gestures were transformed into shivering intensities. She danced like the wine-steeped Noah; she danced as danced David before the Ark of the Covenant. And she was Herodias pirouetting for the price of John's head, and her brow was wreathed with serpents. Followed the convulsive curvings of the Nautch and the opaque splendours of stately Moorish slaves. Debora threw her watcher into a frenzy of fear. He crouched under a sky that roofed him in with its menacing blackness; the orbs of the girl were shot with crescent lightnings. Alien in his desolation, he wondered if her solemn leaps, as the music dashed with frantic speed upon his ear-drums, signified the incarnation of Devi, dread slayer of men! The primal charmers affrighted his vision: Lilith, Ourania, Astarté, Ashtaroth, Belkis, Ishtar, Mylitta, Cotytto, and many immemorial figures from before the Flood streamed by and melted into the woven paces of Debora—this new Jephtha's daughter dancing to her doom as her father fingered the Tune of Time. In the whirling patterns of her dance, Ferval discerned, though dimly, the Veil of Maya, the veil of illusion called Space, on the thither side of which are embroidered the fugacious symbols of Time....
... As the delirious music faltered and fainted, he watched the tragic eyes of Debora yellowing cat-like. His senses and imagination had been hypnotized by all this fracas and by the beauty of the girl. With such a mate and such formidable music, he could conquer the earth! His brain was afire with the sweetness of the odour that enveloped them, an odour as penetrating as the music of the nocturnal Chopin.
"Debora," he whispered, "you must never go away from me." She hung her head. The old man was not to be seen; the darkness had swallowed him. Ferval quietly passed his arm about the waist of the silent woman and slowly they walked in the tender night. She was the first to speak:—