Livette fastened her horse to the ring in the church-wall, and walked in the direction of the gipsy music. It seemed to her that she might probably learn something there.
Now, Zinzara the Egyptian had seen Livette ride into the village, and her music had no other purpose than to attract her, and Renaud, her fiancé, with her, if he were there. Why? to see;—to bring together for an instant, with no fixed purpose, upon the same point of the vast world through which she wandered, two of the personages with whom she “beguiled her time;” to look on at the comedy of life, and to watch the sequel, with the inclination to give an evil turn to it, chance aiding. She loved the anomalies that result from the chaotic jumbling together of circumstances.
Zinzara was turning a kaleidoscope whose field was vast like the horizon of her never-ending travels, and whose bits of glass, multicolored, were living souls.—She turned the wheel to see what calamity destiny, with her assistance, would bring to pass. The amusement of a woman, of a sorceress.
XIII
THE SNAKE-CHARMER
Life is an enigma. The everlasting silence of space is but the endless murmuring of invisible circles which, twining in and out, part and meet again, lose and never find one another, or are inextricably interwoven forever. Life is an enigma. We can see something of its beginning, nothing of its close; its meaning escapes us, but all the links make the chain, and some one knows the rest.
That there are two ends to the ladder is certain. Day is not night, and one does not exist without the other. There are joy and sorrow, health and sickness, happiness and unhappiness, life and death—in a word, good and evil, for the beast of flesh and bone. This is a good man, that a bad. Religion and morals have nothing to do with it, and afford no explanation; but little children know that it is so, and fools know it likewise. They who undertake to reason the thing out learnedly, befog it. They who pull the thread break it. There is some one and there is something. Nothing is null, I tell you, my good friends, and yonder drivelling old idiot, sitting on the stone at the foot of the Calvary before the church, and holding out his hand to Livette, knows two things better than we—good and evil. The idiot, when he passed the gipsies’ wagons in the morning, talked amicably, yes, he talked for some minutes with two or three gaunt dogs chained up under the wagons; but when he saw Zinzara, the queen, fix her eyes upon him, the idiot was afraid and limped away as fast as he could. He was afraid because there was, in Zinzara’s look, something not good.
And now Livette, as she passes by, glances at him, and the idiot—poor human worm—smiles and holds out to her a glass pearl,—a treasure in his eyes,—which he found that morning in the filth of the gutter near by. The pearl glistens. It is bright blue. The idiot sees beauty in it, and offers it to the pretty girl passing by. Livette smiles at him, and he, the drivelling idiot, the cripple who drags himself along the ground, laughs back at Livette. He laughs and feels his man’s heart vaguely opening within him—why?—because of something good in Livette’s eyes.
God is above us, and the devil beneath us. God? what do you mean by God? Kindly humanity, which is above us and toward which we are ascending; the ideal, evolved from ourselves which, by dint of declaring itself and compelling love, will be realized in our children. The devil? what is that? the obscure beast, the ravenous, blind worm, which we were, and from which we are moving farther and farther away.