The Best Horrors by F. Marion Crawford. Francis Marion Crawford

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ They moved toward the door. Ram Lal spoke as he turned away.

      "We leave you, friend Griggs, but we will return this evening and bid you farewell." So I was left alone. Another comforter had taken my place; one knowing human nature better, and well versed in the learning of the spirit. One of that small band of high priests who in all ages and nations and religions and societies have been the mediators between time and eternity, to cheer and comfort the broken-hearted, to rebuke him who would lose his own soul, to speed the awakening spirit in its heavenward flight.

      * * * * *

      As I sat in my room that night the door opened and they were with me, standing hand in hand.

      "My friend," said Isaacs, "I have come to bid you farewell. You will never see me again. I am here once more to thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for your friendship and kind offices, for the strength of your arm in the hour of need, and for the gold of your words in time of uncertainty."

      "Isaacs," I said, "I know little of the journey you are undertaking, and I cannot go with you. This I know, that you are very near to a life I cannot hope for; and I pray God that you may speed quickly to the desired end, that you may attain that happiness which your brave soul and honest heart so well deserve. Once more, then, I offer you my fullest service, if there is anything that I still can do."

      "There is nothing," he answered, "though if there were I know you would do it gladly and entirely. I have bestowed all my worldly possessions on the one man besides yourself to whom I owe a debt of gratitude—John Westonhaugh. Had I known you less well, I would have made you a sharer in my forsaken wealth. Only this I beg of you. Take this gem and keep it always for my sake. No—do not look at it in that way. Do not consider its value. It is to recall one who will often think of you, for you have been a great deal to me in this month."

      "I would I might have been more," I said, and it was all I could say, for my voice failed me.

      "Think of me," he continued, and the bright light shone through his face in the dusk, "think of me, not as you see me now, or as I was this morning, bowed beneath a great sorrow, but as looking forward to a happiness that transcends this mortal joy that I have lost, even as the glory of things celestial transcends the glory of the terrestrial. Think of me, not as mourning the departed day, but as watching longingly for the first faint dawn of the day eternal. Above all, think of me not as alone but as wedded for all ages to her who has gone before me."

      Ram Lal laid his hand on my arm and looked long into my eyes.

      "Farewell for the present, my chance acquaintance," he said, "and remember that in me you have a friend. The day may come when you too will be in dire distress, beyond the skill of mere solitude and books to soothe. Farewell, and may all good things be with you."

      Isaacs laid his two hands on my shoulders, and once more I met the wondrous lustre of his eyes, now veiled but not darkened with the last look of his tender friendship.

      "Good-bye, my dear Griggs. You have been the instructor and the genius of my love. Learn yourself the lessons you can teach others so well. Be yourself what you would have made me."

      One last loving look—one more pressure of the reluctant fingers, and those two went out, hand in hand, under the clear stars, and I saw them no more.

       With the Immortals

       Table of Contents

       CHAPTER I.

       CHAPTER II.

       CHAPTER III.

       CHAPTER IV.

       CHAPTER V.

       CHAPTER VI.

       CHAPTER VII.

       CHAPTER VIII.

       CHAPTER IX.

       CHAPTER X.

       CHAPTER XI.

       CHAPTER XII.

       CHAPTER XIII.

       CHAPTER XIV.

      CHAPTER I.

       Table of Contents

      The southern shore of the Sorrentine peninsula offers a striking contrast to the northern side. Towards the north the mountain opens into a broad basin, filled to the brim with soft tufo rock, upon which the vegetation of ages has deposited a deep and fertile soil. The hills slope gently to the cliffs which overhang the bay of Naples and they seem to bear in their outstretched arms a rich offering of Nature's fairest gifts for the queen city of the south. The orange and the lemon, the olive and the walnut elbow each other for a footing in the fat dark earth; and where there is not room for them, the holes and crannies of the walls shoot out streamers of roses and thrust forth nosegays of white-flowered myrtle. Westward from the enchanted garden of Sorrento the rocky promontory juts far into the sea, so that only a narrow channel, scarcely three miles wide, separates the mainland from sea-girt Capri, towering up from the blue water and rearing his rocky crest to heaven like some enormous dragon-beast of fable. Far down in the deep mid-channel, lies the watch tower bell stolen by the Saracen corsairs from the little fort upon the shore; on Saint John's Eve the fishermen, casting their nets in the orange-tinted twilight, hear the tones of the long-lost bronze ringing up to them out of the depths, and the rough men tell each other how, on that very night of the year, long ago. Saint Nicholas raised a fierce storm in the "Bocca di Crape" and forced the heathen pirates to lighten their craft by heaving overboard the bell and the rest of the booty they had carried off.

      Doubling the point, and running along the southern shore of the little peninsula, the scene changes. The rocks, which on the other side slope gently down, here rise precipitously from the dark water, throwing up great rugged friezes of hacked stone against the sky, casting black shadows under every sharpened peak and seeming to defy the foot of man and beast. Here and there, a little town hangs like the nest of a sea-bird in a cranny of the cliffs, poised on the brink as you may fancy a sea-nymph drawing up her feet out of reach of the waves, facing the fierce, hot south-west, whence the storms sweep in, black and melancholy and wrathfully thundering. A mile away, but seemingly within a СКАЧАТЬ