“The precise formula of the Mysterious Brotherhood!—the very words uttered by the dead mother who bore me! How did this girl obtain it? When? Where? From whom?”
Beverly started, gazed into the mighty depths of her eye, was about to ask the questions suggested, but forbore.
“We may all be happy yet,” said she; “for the Great Spirit tells me so!” And she crossed her hands upon her virgin breast—breast glowing with immortal fervor and inspiration; and she threw, by a toss of the head, her long, black sea of hair behind her, and stood revealed the perfect incarnation of faith and hope, as if her upturned eyes met God’s glance from Heaven. The old chief and the boy at his side said nothing, but each instinctively folded his hands in the attitude of confidence and prayer. The combined effect of all this upon the young man was electric. The singular incident struck him so forcibly that he rose to his feet, placed his hand upon the girl’s head, uplifted his eyes and voice to heaven, and, from the depths of his soul, responded “Amen, and Amen.”
It was at this critical instant that I, the editor of these papers, chanced to come up to where this scene was being enacted. A few words sufficed for an introduction, and on that spot begun a friendship between us all that death himself is powerless to break.
Two hours thereafter, the chief, his son, the girl, the youth, were, with myself, partaking of a friendly meal at the old man’s house. After the repast was over, the conversation took a philosophic turn, in which the chief, who was a really splendid specimen of the cultivated Indian, took an active and interested part.
Presently the old people took their pipes, the younger ones went to bed, and Beverly and ’Levambea, as she was almost universally called, walked out, and sat them down beneath an old sycamore that stretched its giant limbs like the genius of protection over the cottage. There they talked gaily enough at first, but presently in a tender and pathetic strain; and it was clear that there had sprung up between them already something much warmer than friendship, yet which was not love. When they rose to enter the house, the last words uttered by the girl—uttered in the same singularly inspired strain observed on their first meeting—were, “Yes! I will love you; but not here, not now, perhaps not on this earth. Yet I will be your prop, your stay, though deep seas between us roll. Listen! When I am in danger you will know it, wherever you may be. When you are in danger you will see me. Forget not what I say. Ask me no questions. Your fate is a singular one, but not more so than my own. Good night! Good-bye! We will see each other no more at present—it is not permitted!” And without another word she abruptly left him, darted into the house, passed up the stairs, and was gone like a spirit.
Next day, at the solicitation of the chief and others who took an interest in young Beverly, he consented to go with me to my home, many leagues from that spot; and, accordingly, in due time we arrived there, and for several months he was an inmate of my house; and, while under the shadow of ill health and its consequent sympathetic state, I became intimate with many of the loftier and profound secrets of the celebrated Rosicrucian fraternity, with which he was familiar, and which he gave me liberty to divulge to a certain extent, conditioned that I forbore to reveal the locality of the lodges of the Dome, or indicate the persons or names of its chief officers, albeit, no such restriction was exacted in reference to the lesser temples of the order—covering the first three degrees in this country—to the acolytes of which the higher lodges are totally unknown. Oh! how often have I sat beside him, on the green banks of a creek that ran through my little farm, and raptly listened to the profoundest wisdom, the most exalted conceptions and descriptions of the soul, its origin, nature, powers, and its destinies—listened to metaphysical speculations that fairly racked my brain to comprehend, and all this from the lips of a man totally incapable of grappling successfully with the money-griping world of barter and of trade. Here was the most tremendous contradiction, in one man, that I had ever known or heard of. One who revelled in mental luxuries fit for an angel, yet had not forecast enough to foil a common trickster;—who blindly, and for years, reposed his whole trust in one whose sole aim was to rob him not only of his little competence, but of his character as a man—who suffered one near and dear to him to starve, literally starve to death, and then be buried, at the very moment that himself and his were luxuriating on the very money for which that man had bartered health, and almost life itself! Was it not very singular? I have wondered, time and again, how such things could be, and intensely so when he has been revealing to me some of the loftier mysteries of the Order; when talking of Apollonius of Tyanæ, the Platonists, the elder Pythagoreans; of the Sylphs, Salamanders and Glendoveers; of Cardan, and Yung-tse-Soh, and the Cabalistic Light; of Hermes Trismegistus, and the Smaragdine Tables; of sorcery and magic, white and black; of the Labyrinth, and Divine policy; of the God, and the republic of gods; of the truths and absurdities of the gold-seeking Hermetists and pseudo-Rosicrucians; of Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Cyprian, Lactantius, and the Alexandrine Clement; of Origen and Macrobius, Josephus and Philo; of Enoch and the pre-Adamite races; of Dambuk and Cekus, Psellus, Jamblichus, Plotinus and Porphyrius, Paracelsus, and over seven hundred other mystical authors.
Said he to me one day, “Do you remember laughing at me when I first began to talk about the Rosicrucians? and you asserted that, if such a fraternity existed, it must be composed either of knaves or fools, laughing heartily when informed that the order ramified extensively on both sides of the grave, and, on the other shore of time, was known in its lower degrees as the Royal Order of the Foli, and, towering infinitely beyond and above that, was the great Order of the Neridii; and that whoever, actuated by proper motives, joined the fraternity on this side of the grave, was not only assured of protection, and a vast amount of essential knowledge imparted to him here, but also of sharing a lot on the farther side of life, compared to which all other destinies were insignificant and crude. I repeat this assertion now.”
FOOTNOTE:
[2] Romaic—Ευλαμπια—Eulampía—Evlambéah. “Bright-shining.”—Lovely, mystically beautiful.