“Soon again?” he echoed, with a pathetic glance upward at the dazzling blue sky—“Soon? In a thousand years?—or a thousand thousand?—for so do happy angels count the time. To me an hour is long—but to Lilith, cycles are moments.”
His head sank on his breast,—he seemed to fall suddenly into a dreamy state of meditation,—and just then a slow bell began to toll to and fro from a wooden turret on the monastery roof.
“That is for vespers”—said Féraz—“Will you come, Madame, and hear our singing? You shall see El-Râmi again afterwards.”
Silently she rose, but her movement to depart roused El-Râmi from his abstraction, and he looked at her wistfully.
“They say there is happiness in the world”—he said slowly, “but I have not found it. Little messenger of peace, are you happy?”
The pathos of his rich musical voice, as he said the words “little messenger of peace,” was indescribably touching. Strathlea found his eyes suddenly growing dim with tears, and Irene’s voice trembled greatly as she answered—
“No, not quite happy, dear friend;—we are none of us quite happy.”
“Not without love,”—said El-Râmi, speaking with sudden firmness and decision—“Without love we are powerless. With it, we can compass all things. Do not miss love; it is the clue to the great Secret,—the only key to God’s mystery. But you know this already,—better than I can tell you,—for I have missed it,—not lost it, you understand, but only missed it. I shall find it again,—I hope, ... I pray I shall find it again! God be with you, little messenger! Be happy while you can!”
He extended his hand with a gesture which might have been one of dismissal or benediction or both, and then sank into his former attitude of resigned contemplation, while Irene Vassilius, too much moved to speak, walked across the court between Strathlea and the beautiful young “Brother Sebastian,” scarcely seeing the sunlight for tears. Strathlea, too, was deeply touched;—so splendid a figure of a man as El-Râmi he had seldom seen, and the ruin of brilliant faculties in such a superb physique appeared to him the most disastrous of calamities.
“Is he always like that?” he inquired of Féraz, with a backward compassionate glance at the quiet figure sitting under the cedar-boughs.