When he leaped ashore and flung himself in the shade of the wood, the intoxication had increased. So, not for nothing had he met the priest. That encounter, the delay in the journey, the stay in the village, the peculiar character of the man, his odd theory, were like elements of an antidote, compounded to meet that venom which the vicious had injected into his life. Wonderful! He looked at the open book beside him, and then rose to his knees, with the water dripping from his limbs. In a loud voice he made a profession of faith.
"I believe in God forever."
CHAPTER V.
THE DOOR IS CLOSED.
Even Martha was startled by the change in him. She had hoped and prayed for it, but had not looked for it so soon, and did not expect blithe spirits after such despair. In deep joy he poured out his soul to her all the evening, but never mentioned deeds or names in his tragedy. Martha hardly thought of them. She knew from the first that this man's soul had been nearly wrecked by some shocking deviltry, and that the best medicine for him was complete forgetfulness. Horace felt as a life-prisoner, suddenly set free from the loathsomest dungeon in Turkestan, might feel on greeting again the day and life's sweet activities. The first thought which surged in upon him was the glory of that life which had been his up to the moment when sorrow engulfed him.
"My God," he cried to Martha, "is it possible that men can hold such a treasure, and prize it as lightly as I did once."
He had thought almost nothing of it, had been glad to get rid of each period as it passed, and of many persons and scenes connected with childhood, youth, and manhood. Now they looked to him, these despised years, persons, and scenes, like jewels set in fine gold, priceless jewels of human love fixed forever in the adamant of God's memory. They were his no more. Happily God would not forget them, but would treasure them, and reward time and place and human love according to their deserving. He was full of scorn for himself, who could take and enjoy so much of happiness with no thought of its value, and no other acknowledgment than the formal and hasty word of thanks, as each soul laid its offering of love and service at his feet.
"You're no worse than the rest of us," said Martha, "I didn't know, and very few of my friends ever seemed to know, what good things they had till they lost 'em. It may be that God would not have us put too high a price on 'em at first, fearin' we'd get selfish about 'em. Then when they're gone, it turns our thoughts more to heaven, which is the only place where we have any chance to get 'em back."
When he had got over his self-scorn, the abyss of pain and horror out of which God had lifted him—this was his belief—showed itself mighty and terrible to his normal vision. Never would he have believed that a man could fall so far and so awfully, had he not been in those dark depths and mounted to the sun again. He had read of such pits as exaggerations. He had seen sorrow and always thought its expression too fantastic for reality. Looking down now into the noisome tunnel of his own tragedy, he could only wonder that its wretched walls and exit did not carry the red current of blood mingled with its own foul streaks. Nothing that he had done in his grief expressed more than a syllable of the pain he had endured. The only full voice to such grief would have been the wrecking of the world. Strange that he could now look calmly into this abyss, without the temptation to go mad. But its very ghastliness turned his thought into another channel. The woman who had led him into the pit, what of her? Free from the tyranny of her beauty, he saw her with all her loveliness, merely the witch of the abyss, the flower and fruit of that loathsome depth, in whose bosom filthy things took their natural shape of horror, and put on beauty only to entrap the innocent of the upper world. Yes, he was entirely freed from her. Her name sounded to his ears like a name from hell, but it brought no paleness to his cheeks, no shock to his nerves, no stirring of his pulses. The loom of Penelope was broken, and forever, he hoped.