She Buildeth Her House. Will Levington Comfort

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СКАЧАТЬ appealed to her as a fundamental verity. Man must conquer not only his body, but his brain, with its subtle dreams of power, a more formidable conflict, before the soul assumes supremacy in the mind, and man's progress to the Uplands becomes a conscious and glorious ascent.

      "You put it with wonderful clearness, Madame Nestor," she said.

      "I am an old woman who has thought of these things until they are clear. This is the real battle of man, beside which victory over mere appetites of the body is but a boyish triumph. The intellect hungers for power and possession; to hold the many inferior intellects in its own despotic destiny. Against this glittering substance of attraction is the still intangible faith of the soul—an awful moment of suspense. God or Mammon—choose ye! … Listen, Paula, to New York below—treading the empty mill of commerce——"

      "New York has not chosen yet?"

      "No, dear, but hundreds, thousands, are learning in preparation for that moment of choice—the falseness and futility of material possessions."

      "That is a good thought—an incorruptible kind of optimism!" Paula exclaimed. … "You think this Bellingham has made the evil choice?"

      "Yes. Long ago."

      "Yet to have arisen to the moment of choosing, you say he must have conquered the flesh."

      "Yes."

      "But you depict him—I find him—Desire Incarnate!"

      "Exactly, Paula, because he has reverted. The animal controls his mind, not the soul. Bellingham is retracing his way back to chaos, with a human brain, all lit with magic! Out of the gathered knowledge of the ages, he has drawn his forces, which to us are mystery. He uses these secret forces of Nature to prolong his own life—which is all he has. The mystic cord is severed within him. He is a body, nothing but a body—hence the passion to endure. Out of the craft of the past, he has learned—who knows how long ago?—to replenish his own vitality with that of others. He gives nothing, but drains all. Ah, Paula, this I know too well. He is kin with those creatures of legend, the loup-garou, the vampire. I tell you he is an insatiable sponge for human magnetism."

      "Past all doubt, can't Bellingham turn back?" Paula asked tensely. "With all his worldly knowledge, and knowing his own doom, can he not turn back—far back, a lowly-organized soul, but on the human way?" Hopelessness, anywhere, was a blasting conception to her.

      "No. I tell you he is a living coffin. There is nothing in him to energize a pure motive. He might give a fortune to the poor, but it would be for his own gain. He could not suffer for the poor, or love them. Dead within, he is detached from the great centres of virtue and purity—from all that carries the race forward, and will save us at the last. You see his frightful dependence upon this temporal physical instrument, since all the records of the past and the unwritten pages of the future are wiped out? Isn't it a sheer black horror, Paula—to know that from the great tide of hopeful humanity, one is set apart; to know that the amazing force which has carried one from a cell in the ooze to thinking manhood must end with this red frightened heart; to be forced, for the continuance of life, to feed upon the strength of one woman after another—always fairer and finer——" The look of hatred in the speaker's face had become a banner of havoc.

      "Can he not stop that kind of devouring?" Paula exclaimed. "Would there not be hope—if he battled with that—put that vampirism behind?"

      Madame Nestor regarded the other steadily, until all distortion of feature had given away to her accustomed mildness. Then she uttered an unforgettable question:

      "Can a tiger eat grains?"

      Vast ranges of terrible understanding were suggested.

      "It is my duty, if I ever had a duty," the caller went on, "to make you know Bellingham as I know him. You must have no pity."

      "Is there really no fact by which his age can be determined?"

      "None that I know. Twenty-five years ago, when he left me hideously wise and pitifully drained, he looked as he does now."

      "But why, oh why, do you always think of me with Bellingham?" Paula asked hopelessly.

      "I watched his face when he regarded you last night. I knew the look."

      "What is to prevent me from never seeing him? He cannot force himself upon me here—in the flesh. … Certainly you would not tell him where I am, where I go—if I begged you not to!"

      Madame Nestor shuddered. "No, Paula. It is because you are frightened and tormented that such a thought comes. It is I who am showing you the real Bellingham. He menaces my race. None but big-souled women are useful to him now. He is drawn to them, as one hungry, as one always hungry. It is he first who is drawn. Then they begin to feel and respond to his occult attraction. The time might have come when you would worship him—had I not warned you. I did. I was quite his—until I learned. A woman knows no laws in the midst of an attraction like this. No other man suffices——"

      "But why—why do you prepare me? Do you think I cannot resist?" Paula asked furiously. She felt the bonds about her already. The blood rose hot and rebellious at the thought of being bound. It was the old hideous fear of a locked room—the shut-in horror which meant suffocation.

      "If I thought you could not resist, Paula," Madame Nestor said, "I should advise you to flee to the remotest country—this moment. I should implore you never to allow from your side your best and strongest friend. But I have studied your brain, your strength, your heart. I love you for the thought that has come to me—that it is you, Paula Linster, who is destined to free the race from this destroyer."

      Often in the last half-hour had come a great inward revolt against the trend of her caller's words. It passed through Paula again, yet she inquired how she could thus be the means.

      "By resisting him. Bellingham once told me—trust him, this was after I was fully his—that if I had matched his force with a psychic resistance equally as strong—it would mortally have weakened him. So if he seeks to subvert your will and fails, this great one-pointed power of his, developed who knows how long—will turn and rend itself. This is an occult law."

      Paula could understand this—the wild beast of physical desire rending itself at the last—but not the conception of hopelessness—Bellingham cut off from immortality. The woman divined her thoughts.

      "Again I beg of you," she said in excitement, "not to let a thought of pity for him insinuate itself in your brain—not the finest point of it! Think of yourself, of the Great Good which must sustain you, of the benefit to your race—think of the women less strong! Fail in this, and Bellingham will absorb your splendid forces, and let you fall back into the common as I did—to rise again, ah, so bitterly, so wearily! … But I cannot imagine you failing, you strong young queen, and the women like me, the legion of emptied shells he has left behind—we shall canonize you, Paula, if you shatter the vampire's power."

      Thoughts came too fast for speech now. They burned Paula's mind—a destructive activity, because ineffectual. She wanted to speak of the shameful experience of the morning, but she could not bring the words to confession.

      "I had almost forgotten," she said lightly at length, "that it is well for one to eat and drink. Stay, won't you please, and share a bite of supper with me, Madame Nestor? We'll talk of other things. I am deadly tired of Bellingham."

      A hungry man would have known СКАЧАТЬ