Chapter 5 LOVE. EULAMPéA[2]-THE BEAUTIFUL.

The golden sun was setting, and day was sinking beneath his crimson coverlets in the glowing west. The birds, on thousand green boughs, were singing the final chorus of the summer opera; the lambs were skipping homeward in the very excess of joy; while the cattle on the hills lowed and bellowed forth their thanksgiving to the viewless Lord of Glory. Man alone seemed unconscious of his duty and the blessings he enjoyed. Toil-weary farmers were slowly plodding their way supper and bed-ward, and all nature seemed to be preparing to enjoy her bath of rest.

Still sat the wanderer by the highway side; still fell his tears upon the grateful soil; and as the journeyers home and tavern-ward passed him by, many were the remarks they made upon him, careless whether he heard them or not. Some in cruel, heartless mockery and derision, some few in pity, and all in something akin to surprise, for men of his appearance were rarely seen in that neighborhood. At last there came along three persons, two of whom were unmistakably Indians, and the third, a girl of such singular complexion, grace, form, and extraordinary facial beauty, it was extremely difficult to ethnologically define what she was. This girl was about fourteen; the boy who accompanied her and the grey-haired old Indian by her side, was apparently about twelve years old. This last was the first to notice the stranger.

"Oh, Evlambéa," said he, "see! there's a man crying, and I'm going to help him!" The boy spoke in his own vernacular, for he was a full blood of the Oneida branch of the Mohawks, fearless, honorable, quick, impulsive, and generous as sunlight itself. To see distress and fly to its relief was but a single thing for him, and used to be with his people until improved and "civilized" with bad morals and worse protection. The Indian was Ki-ah-wah-nah (The Lenient and Brave) chief of the Stockbridge section of the Mohawks. The girl, Evlambéa, nominally passed for his grandchild, but such was not the case, for although she might well be taken for a fourth blood, she really had not a trace of Indian about her, further than the costume, language, and general education and habit. Her name was modern Greek, or Romaic, but her features and complexion no more resembled that of the pretty dwellers on Prinkipo or the shores of the Bosphorus, than that of the Indians or Anglo Saxon. Many years previous to that day, this girl, then a child of three or four months age, had been brought to the chief and left in his care for a week, by a woman clad in the garb of, and belonging to a wandering band of gipsies, who, attracted by the universal reputation of the New World, had left Bohemia and crossed the seas to reap a golden harvest. This band had held its headquarters for nearly a year on Cornhill, Utica, whence they had deployed about the country in a circle whose radius averaged one hundred and twenty miles. The woman never came back to claim the child, for the members of the band suddenly decamped after having financiered a gullible old farmer out of several thousands of dollars in gold, which they had persuaded him it was necessary that he should put in a bag and bury in the ground at a certain hour of a certain night, in order to the speedy discovery of a large mine of diamonds that was certainly upon his farm, and would as surely be brought to light when the gold was exhumed after a certain time, which time was quite long enough for the band to dig up the gold and disperse in all directions, to meet again three thousand miles away. This bit of Cornhill swindling was considered rather sharp practice, even for that locality, and ended by shrouding the girl in an impenetrable mystery, and giving to the old chief a child, who, as she expanded and grew up became quite as dear to his heart as any one of his own offspring; and in fact, by reason of her superior intelligence, she became far more so, for mind ever makes itself felt and admired. Not one of the ethnological, physical, moral, or mental characteristics which mark the Romany tribes was to be noticed in this girl, and wise people concluded that she had somewhere been stolen by the woman, who from fear or policy had left her to her fate and the good old Indian's care.

Esthetics is not my forte, hence I shall not attempt to describe the young girl. The name she bore was marked on her clothing in Greek letters, which were afterwards rendered into English by a professor of a college whose assistance had been asked by the Indian.

Besides being known far and near as the most beautiful girl of her age, she was also distinguished as by far the most intelligent. She was undisputed queen on the Reservation, not by right, but by quiet usurpation. She looked and acted the born Empress, and her triplicate sceptre consisted of kindness, intelligence, and that nameless dignity and presence inherent in truly noble souls.

Such was the bright-shining maiden, who, attracted by the boy's cry and actions, now crossed over to the side of young Beverly. Observing his sorrowful appearance, she placed her soft hand tenderly upon his head, and said in tones heart-felt and deeply sympathetic, "Man of the heavy heart, why weep you here? Is your mother just dead?"

The young man raised his head, saw the radiant girl before him, and, after a moment's hesitation, during which he shuddered as if at some painful memory, murmuring, "No; it cannot be possible!-cannot be-in this part of the world, too! no!" he replied to her, saying, "Girl, I am lonely, and that is why I weep. I am but a boy, yet the weight of years of grief rest on and bear me down. To-day is the anniversary of my mother's death, and, when it comes, I always pass it in tears and prayer. Since she went home to heaven, I have had no true friend, and my lot and life are miserable indeed. Men call themselves my friends, and prove it by robbing me. Not long ago, there came a man to me-he was very rich-and said, 'People tell me that you are very skillful with the sick. Come; I have a sister whom the physicians say must die. I love her. You are poor; I am rich. Save her; gold shall be yours.' I went. She was beyond the reach of medicine, and it was possible to prolong her life only in one of two ways-either by the transfusion of blood from my veins to her own, or by the transfusion of life itself. I was young and strong, and we resolved to adopt the latter alternative, as being the only possibly effective one; and for months, during three years, I sat beside that poor sick girl, and freely let her wasted frame draw its very life by magnetically sapping my own. Finally, I began to sink with exhaustion and disease similar to her own, and, to save my life, was forced to break the magnetic cord, and go to Europe. As soon as it was severed she sunk into the grave, and then I returned, and received a considerable sum of money in the nature of a loan. This favor was granted me as a reward for my pains, time, and ruined health. I was to return it from the proceeds of a business to be immediately established. At that time I resolved to purchase a little home for those who depended on my efforts for the bread they ate, and so wrote to a man who called himself my friend, but who is the direct cause of most of the evil I have for ten years experienced. This fellow pretended to deal in lands. I put nine hundred dollars-half I had in the world-in this man's hands, to purchase a fine little place of a few acres, which place he took me to see. I was pleased with it, and saw a home for those who would be left behind me when I was dead. A few days thereafter this ghoul came to me again, and represented that gold bullion being down he could make considerable profit for me in three days, would I make the investment. I handed over the remainder of my money. The three days lengthened into years. Instead of being a capitalist he was a bankrupt-was not in the gold business, and had no more control of the land he showed me than he had of Victoria's crown. Meantime, my furniture was seized; I lost my name with the friend who advanced the sum; I became ill, and, in my agony, called this man a swindler. To silence me, he gave me a check on a bank. I presented it. 'No funds!' And yet he dared call himself an honest man. 'You have but to unsay the harsh things said about me,' said this semblance of a man to me one day, 'and I am ready to pay you everything I owe.' My mind was unsettled; I listened to him, and the result was that, by duplicity and fraud, more mean and despicable than the first, if there be a depth of villainy more profound, he obtained my signature to an acknowledgment that the money of which he had openly swindled me, then in his hands, was 'a friendly loan.' And then he laughed, 'Ha! ha!' and he laughed, 'Ho! ho!' at me and my misery, and actually suffered a child in our family to perish and wretchedly die for the want of food and medicine. But then he told me that he had buried it properly, respectably, up there in the cemetery, and it was the only truth I ever heard from his lips. But then he sent the funeral bills for me to pay-all the while laughing at my misery-while the lordly house he occupied was redeemed from forced sale with my money, and himself and his feasted luxuriously every day on what was the price of my heart's blood! Still, they all laughed, 'Ha! ha!' and grew fat on my blood. I still have the memory of a dead child, up there in the cemetery. Poor starved child! It is no satisfaction to me to know that this man will die a disgraced pauper, dependent on charity for bread. Still less is it to realize, as I do, that the brothel and the gibbet, the gambling hell and massive prisons, are shadowed in the foreground of his line, and that it will utterly perish from off the earth in ignominy and horror. I would not have it so, but fate is fate; and I see, at least, one dangling form of his race swinging in the air! My prophetic eye beholds--"

As the man uttered these terrible sentences, he shuddered as if horror-stricken at the impending fate of this wronger of the living and the dead, and it was clear to the girl that he would have freely averted the doom, had such a thing been possible.

"Men and cliques," said he, "have used me for their purposes-have, like this ghoul, wormed themselves into my confidence, and then, when their ends were served, have ever abandoned me to wretchedness and misery.

"Rosicrucians, and all other delvers in the mines of mystery, all dealers with the dead, all whose idiosyncracies are toward the ideal, the mystic and the sublime, are debtors to nature, and the price they pay for power is groans, tears, breaking hearts, and a misery that none but such doomed ones can either appreciate or understand. Compensation is an inexorable law of being, nor can there, by any possibility, be any evasion of it. The possession of genius is a certificate of perpetual suffering.

"You now know why I am sad, O girl of the good heart. I am weak to-night; to-morrow will bring strength again. But, see! the golden sun is setting in the west. Alas! I fear that my sun is setting also for a long, long night of wretchedness."

"You speak well, man of the sore spirit," replied the girl. "You speak well when you say the sun is setting; but you seem to forget that it will rise again, and shine as brightly as he does to-day! He will shine even though dark clouds hide him from us; and though you and I may not behold his glories, some one else will see his face, and feel his blessed heat. Old men tell us that the darkest hour is just before the break of day. I bid you take heart. You may be happy yet!"

"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 Tyan?, 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.