He began soon, in his difficulty, to read up the countless Oriental cases of prenatal memory. There, in the East, souls that have been parted by bodily death are reunited in another shape, and know each other and are happy. There the great facts of life, of that shadowy fallacy that we call death, are clearly known and understood. But here we are still driven by phantom fears, and troubled by that which has no real existence except in our own weakened imaginations. Our memories are too closely trammelled by false teaching, too little practised and experienced, to pass intact across the blank interval of physical death. At the best it is only an occasional glimpse we carry on into another life, and even so those glimpses come but rarely, and fade as our earthly life advances to maturity again. More people have these glimpses, it is true, than ever dare to acknowledge them; but they are little understood and never fairly made use of. It is to the East we must go to see how little account the trained soul makes of physical death. There, through innumerable ages, the light has been seen, and memory has been educated from hour to hour and from day to day until at last the soul finds it as easy to recall the events of a hundred years ago as those of last night or this morning. Kingston studied the many cases that the Eastern Gospel gives us, and which Western science is just beginning to discern anew. Always he hoped against hope that they would give him some key to unlock the house of memory. Yes, the mortal body is just that—a house of memory, a jerry-built house at best. But the lock is stern and stark. What key is there, what jemmy, what crowbar, that can prevail on the lock that guards the house of memories, can prevail, at least, without wrecking the house and letting the memories go free once more?
Kingston had no hope that he could find such a key. The old Eastern stories showed the glorified free memory as the possession only of the free glorified soul that has escaped the bondage of desire. When desire has passed away, then the uncontaminated soul knows no barrier of time or space. But in the kingdom of desire are all the burning pains and limitations which desire provides to scourge its devotees in the very moment of their seeming satisfaction. To eyes desirous, life is narrowed to a thing of the moment; it is only from the high places of enlightenment that the opened eye of the Real Self can wander over all the fields of existence, and see the nullity of death, the eternity of truth and holiness, from bodily life to bodily life, until at last the great goal is gained. Kingston saw himself helpless now in the grip of the passion he had invoked. Nothing could satisfy it, nothing could release him from it. Nothing but the death of his body, and even that release seemed now to his awakening intelligence to be but problematical. He began to wonder what could be the end of this fantastic tangle. Days went by, and he found himself more tightly chained to the agony of his perpetual disappointment in Ivor Restormel, more cruelly hungry for the satisfaction which lay for ever in his sight and beyond his reach, more and more fiercely stung by the misery that he himself had brought upon himself.
He grew into a sense of drifting towards a catastrophe; the strain, the torment could not be prolonged indefinitely without the sudden snap of his endurance. Some thunderclap of fate must break up the dreadful stagnation of this nightmare. As the time passed, and his efforts brought him no nearer to fulfilment, made it increasingly plain that he could never come any nearer to fulfilment, he felt the growing imminence of doom. This companion who was no companion, his desire had evoked It from the shadows, soon It must go back into the shadows from which he had called It, having first accomplished fully the punishment of his selfishness. He watched the human Ivor Restormel with a curious consciousness of watching a thing unearthly, a thing moving amid darkness towards a great darkness not so very far away. This boy, so much alive, so content with life, was not in reality alive at all. He was just a shadow, a faint film of personality, by comparison with the old living thing that lurked in him. Vague and indeterminate as his own character was, he was the penalty, made incarnate, of Kingston’s own selfishness; he was the eidolon of the past projected into the present in order to tantalize and damn the soul that had desired it. Built of clouds, he must pass back ere long, swiftly, tragically into cloudland, and that reality behind the clouds, that living fragment far down in the shadowy personality of the boy, must pass onwards again on its upward way—that strange immortal essence which once had been Isabel. And this foreknowledge of the end, this sensation of drifting daily more and more hurriedly towards something terrible, impelled him to cherish with a more and more eager passion this presence that had been vouchsafed to him, however incomplete, however unsatisfying he might find it.
Each hour brought him nearer now to the last that should ever be. He bent himself sternly, in the lessening time that was his, to the desperate task of awakening recollection in a soul where recollection slept for ever. Less and less did he see or think of Ivor Restormel, more and more ardently, more and more despairingly, of the thing that dwelt in Ivor Restormel, the thing that soon must leave its habitation to pass elsewhere again. He sought the boy’s presence more and more persistently, would never spare him out of his sight, exacted more and more of his conversation. And all the while he was caring less and less for the boy, his words, or his utterance. Now that he had found out what it was that had attracted him to the boy, he was ceasing to see the boy himself at all, to hear his earthly voice. All Kingston’s attention was fixed on the glimpses that he could hope to get of the secret presence he divined, his ears were open only to those occasional flashes of memory that spoke in Ivor Restormel out of that remote past beyond the grave. He must make the dreadful most of the short time that was left him. It was but little he could hope to make, but the time, he felt, was running rapidly out towards its end.
Gundred saw everything. Gundred understood nothing. That her husband grew keener and keener to monopolize Ivor Restormel she saw, and righteous anger became fiercer within her. That Kingston should so slight her company as obviously and vehemently to prefer that of a person against whom she had most solemnly warned him, was matter enough and to spare for just wrath. Gundred grew colder and colder in manner, lived more and more aloof, felt stronger and stronger in her consciousness of justified dread. That Kingston clung every moment to the side of his secretary she noticed; that, in reality, he did not care two straws about his secretary she could hardly be expected to discern. The plain and sufficing fact was that he never seemed happy, never at his ease, unless Ivor Restormel were with him, and even then he very rarely seemed perfectly satisfied either. Gundred saw that there was something unusual and mysterious about this friendship that in some ways scarcely seemed a friendship at all, yet made such tremendous claims on time and company.
Gundred, scanning the situation from her retirement, came deliberately to the conclusion that Kingston’s evident infatuation was the result of some malign influence. Nothing else could account for his restless attraction towards Ivor Restormel, combined so frequently with obvious boredom and annoyance when in his company; nothing could so completely explain the apparent innocuousness of Ivor himself, as compared with the instinct of repulsion that Gundred always felt towards him, and felt more fanatically from day to day. Gundred knew that she was not capable of unjust or disorderly feelings. And, if she disliked people, it meant that they deserved to be disliked. And if no reason for such a dislike could be discovered anywhere in Ivor Restormel’s personality, well, that only made it more clear that Gundred’s infallible instinct was founded on her perception in him of some evil supernatural influence, possessing him and working through him. The idea grew and fermented in her brain, and heroic remedies began to suggest themselves. No one, in these dreadful latter days, could seriously doubt that the Evil One was abroad. What more credible than that he should have picked out for attack a soul like her husband’s, which Gundred knew to be weak in doctrine, and saw to be not impeccable in practice? Gundred grew in the certainty that, whether Ivor Restormel knew it or no, he was filled with unhallowed powers that were exerting a wicked force on the man whom he had so uncannily attracted from the first.
All her life’s course had led Gundred along placid, sunny ways, and her nature, through those years, had revealed only the peace and serenity of true refinement. And now, at last, at the touch of this righteous jealousy, there began to stir in her the fierce old blood of Queen Isabel, the stern harsh passions of the Mortimers. The fanatic stirred in its long sleep, and Gundred felt herself inspired to lead a domestic crusade against the Powers of Darkness. At any cost her husband must be saved. In old days an Earl of March had, by his laudable zeal in persecution, elicited commendatory letters from Queen Mary. His spirit now awoke in Gundred, and she realized in herself the strength to act mightily in a noble cause.
In every way this undesirable intruder, who seemed so amiable and pleasant and desirable, was having the most untoward effect on Kingston’s mind and morals. Had he not caused a hitherto blameless and obedient husband to revolt against his wife’s righteous dominion after twenty years of harmony, and to cast her wishes defiantly beneath his feet? And now it became obvious that Kingston was suffering in other ways. She saw him to be a dabbler in things best left alone, in things unhallowed, Satanic, dreadful. Of his attendance on spirit-circles Gundred luckily knew nothing, otherwise, in her determination to be old-fashioned by contrast with the hysterical occultism that now obtains, she would probably have wished to call in an exorcist. But even in his reading he had strayed into improper paths. The strangest things he was now for ever studying—Eastern books and mystical fantasies of the most unsettling description. The weirdest of these he made a point of reading to Ivor Restormel, and Gundred, who generally insisted on being by, noticed that he seemed to read eagerly, challengingly, as if in momentary expectation that the matter would elicit some answering flash of some kind or another from the boy. It never did, and the readings, therefore, always broke off short with a shrug of disappointment and even of disgust; but Gundred divined a soul in peril from the very attempt he made. It was surely an incantation he was practising, an invocation to the mysterious evil thing that haunted Ivor Restormel. She presented a bold front to such dangers, and would not be kept away from the readings.
Kingston one Sunday evening seemed absorbed in his dubious books, while Gundred sat at her knitting, an employment by which she piously signalized the Sabbath. All through the week she did fine needlework, but on Sunday she put away her embroideries and conscientiously knitted comforters for the Deep-sea Fishermen. But suddenly Kingston looked up from his page, and began to read in a curious tone of watchful defiance, addressing his secretary, who was inoffensively engaged with a newspaper. ‘Listen to this, Ivor,’ he began, ‘listen to this, and tell me what you think of it.’ Gundred, in her observant silence, noted that her opinion was not asked, and her wrath grew greater and more righteous, chalking up yet another item to the Evil One’s account. ‘“Once upon a time,”’ read Kingston, ‘“many thousands of years ago, there came a great Buddha to a city in India. He was a great and glorious Buddha, but the time is so very far away now that even his name has passed into Nirvana, and cannot be recalled. But all the people in the city wrought their hardest to do him honour. From the King and his nobles downward everyone gave his richest silks and rugs to line the road of the Holy One’s arrival, and in all their land there was not a widow or a little child so poor that they had not some bright pebble or piece of cloth to do their small homage to the Incarnate Perfection. Only one shepherd lad, from the jungle beyond, had nothing to give. He was young and strong and very beautiful, and his whole soul cried out in worship of the Buddha. The most splendid jewel in the world, the most priceless tapestry and cloth of gold, he would not have thought good enough for the honouring of the Holy One; and yet he had nothing, no treasure, however humble, that he could throw beneath the blessed feet. He, that would have given half the world, had not so much as a handful of painted shells. So his heart was very heavy within him, and sadly did he draw near to the city on the appointed day. And on his road there met him a maiden, lovely and gracious, that wore in her hair a flower. But this was such a flower as the boy had never seen before. It was altogether radiant and heavenly, splendid beyond the imagination of man to conceive. It grew in a cluster of seven blooms, and the fragrance of it filled the jungle. If he could only have this wonderful thing to offer to the Heavenly Visitor, then, indeed, thought the boy, he would at least have done no dishonour to the Light that his heart honoured above all else on earth. ‘Maiden,’ he said, ‘for what price will you sell me the flower that you wear in your hair?’ And she answered that for a very great price she would sell him two blossoms from the cluster. And once again his heart was daunted, for the price she asked was more than anything that he could hope to get together in a long laborious life. He shook his head. ‘I had desired,’ he replied, ‘to do fitting honour to the Holy One, but I see now that that hope is beyond me.’ Then the maiden took the blossom from her hair and held it out towards him, for her eyes were opened. ‘My Lord,’ she answered to the peasant lad, ‘my sight is unsealed, and I can see. Very many years hence—a thousand years hence—I see that you, in the fullness of time, even you yourself shall become a revealed Buddha here on earth. Take this flower of mine, then, without money and without price, but promise me only that in that far day I may stand at your right hand and be near you in your glory.’ And the boy smiled and gave her his word. So after all he had his offering to lay before the Blessed One, and his heart was satisfied. And the maiden went her way through life, and on through the many deaths that lay beyond. And he also, the peasant lad, died in the ripeness of his age, and lived and died through many generations, advancing always on the upward road. And at length the time was accomplished, and the maiden’s prophecy fulfilled. For the peasant lad became the Spotless One, the Buddha Sakhya-Muni, High and Holy, altogether Blessed and Perfect, the Best Friend of All the World. And in that day, the maiden found herself again, and came at last to her reward. For she was the Lady Yasodhara, his wife, the first of all the sacred women that trod the happy way and entered into light....”’
Kingston ceased, his voice filled with interrogation, pausing eagerly for Ivor’s opinion, hoping against hope that that opinion might be more illuminating than he felt it would be. Again and again had he tried to kindle that dormant consciousness with scenes like this, always keenly hoping that they would touch some chord of understanding far down in the hidden depths of the boy’s dual personality. But the hope was never to be fulfilled; he knew it was never to be fulfilled, yet each fresh disappointment was sharper and more wounding than the last. Kingston paused for a comment on the story. None came. After a pause he demanded one.