“All angels love and have their being in that Greater Light,”—continued Féraz softly and steadily—“And there too is Lilith—beautiful—deathless,—faithful——”
“True!” cried El-Râmi, with a sort of sobbing cry—“True! ... She is there,—she promised—and I shall know, ... I shall know where to find her after all, for she told me plainly—‘Look for me where the roses are,—there will I stand and wait.’”
He tottered, and seemed about to fall;—but when Féraz would have supported him, he shook his head, and pointing tremblingly to the amber ray of sunshine pouring itself upon the ground:
“Into the light!”—he murmured—“I am all in the dark;—lead me out of the darkness into the light.”
And Féraz led him, where he desired, and seated him in his own chair in the full glory of the morning radiance that rippled about him like molten gold, and shone caressingly on his white hair,—his dark face that in its great pallor looked as though it were carved in bronze,—and his black, piteous, wandering eyes. A butterfly danced towards him in the sparkling shower of sunbeams, the same that had flown in an hour before and alighted on the heliotrope that adorned the centre of the table. El-Râmi’s attention was attracted by it—and he watched its airy flutterings with a pleased, yet vacant smile. Then he stretched out his hands in the golden light, and lifting them upward, clasped them together and closed his eyes.
“Our Father!” ... he murmured; “which art in Heaven! ... Hallowed be Thy Name!”
Féraz, bending heedfully over him, caught the words as they were faintly whispered,—caught the hands as they dropped inert from their supplicating posture and laid them gently back;—then listened again with strained attention, the pitying tears gathering thick upon his lashes.
“Our Father!” ... once more that familiar appeal of kinship to the Divine stole upon the air like a far-off sigh,—then came the sound of regular and quiet breathing;—Nature had shed upon the overtaxed brain her balm of blessed unconsciousness,—and like a tired child, the proud El-Râmi slept.
XL.
Upstairs meanwhile, in the room that had been Lilith’s there reigned the silence of a deep desolation. The woman Zaroba still crouched there, huddled on the floor, a mere heap of amber draperies,—her head covered, her features hidden. Now and then a violent shuddering seized her,—but otherwise she gave no sign of life. Hours passed;—she knew nothing, she thought of nothing; she was stupefied with misery and a great inextinguishable fear. To her bewildered, darkly superstitious, more than pagan mind, it seemed as if some terrible avenging angel had descended in the night and torn away her beautiful charge out of sheer spite and jealousy lest she should awake to the joys of earth’s life and love. It had always been her fixed idea that the chief and most powerful ingredient of the Divine character (and of the human also) was jealousy; and she considered therefore that all women, as soon as they were born, should be solemnly dedicated to the ancient goddess Anaïtis. Anaïtis was a useful and accommodating deity, who in the old days, had unlimited power to make all things pure. A woman might have fifty lovers, and yet none could dare accuse her of vileness if she were a “daughter” or “priestess” of Anaïtis. She might have been guilty of any amount of moral enormity, but she was held to be the chastest of virgins if Anaïtis were her protectress and mistress. And so, in the eyes of Zaroba, Anaïtis was the true patroness of love,—she sanctified the joys of lovers and took away from them all imputation of sin; and many and many a time had the poor, ignorant, heathenish old woman secretly invoked the protection of this almost forgotten pagan goddess for the holy maiden Lilith. And now—now she wondered tremblingly, if in this she had done wrong? ... More than for anything in the world had she longed that El-Râmi, the “wise man” who scoffed at passion with a light contempt, should love with a lover’s wild idolatry the beautiful creature who was so completely in his power;—in her dull, half-savage, stupid way, she had thought that such a result of the long six years’ “experiment” could but bring happiness to both man and maid; and she spared no pains to try and foster the spark of mere interest which El-Râmi had for his “subject” into the flame of a lover’s ardour. For this cause she had brought Féraz to look upon the tranced girl, in order that El-Râmi knowing of it, might feel the subtle prick of that perpetual motor, jealousy,—for this she had said all she dared say, concerning love and its unconquerable nature;—and now, just when her long-cherished wish seemed on the point of being granted, some dreadful Invisible Power had rushed in between the two, and destroyed Lilith with the fire of wrath and revenge;—at any rate that was how she regarded it. The sleeping girl had grown dear to her,—it war impossible not to love such a picture of innocent, entrancing, ideal beauty,—and she felt as though her heart had been torn open and its very core wrenched out by a cruel and hasty hand. She knew nothing as yet of the fate that had overtaken El-Râmi himself,—for as she could not hear a sound of the human voice, she had only dimly seen that he was led from the room by his young brother, and that he looked ill, feeble, and distraught. What she realised most positively and with the greatest bitterness, was the fact of Lilith’s loss,—Lilith’s evident destruction. This was undeniable,—this was irremediable;—and she thought of it till her aged brain burned as with some inward consuming fire, and her thin blood seemed turning to ice.