The Dark Star. Robert W. Chambers

his book and dropped a heavy hand upon it. 34

      “Amid the myriad pursuits and interests and trades and professions of the human race, amid their multitudinous aspirations, perplexities, doubts, passions, endeavours, deep within every intelligent man remains one dominant desire, one persistent question to be answered if possible.”

      “What desire, father?”

      “The universal desire for another chance—for immortality. Man’s never-ending demand for evidence of an immortality which shall terminate for him the most tremendous of all uncertainties, which shall solve for him the most vital of all questions: What is to become of him after physical death? Is he to live again? Is he to see once more those whom he loved the best?”

      Ruhannah sat thinking in the red stove light, cross-legged, her slim ankles clasped in either hand.

      “But our souls are immortal,” she said at last.

      “Yes.”

      “Our Lord Jesus has said it.”

      “Yes.”

      “Then why should anybody not believe it?”

      “Try to believe it always. Particularly after your mother and I are no longer here, try to believe it. … You are unusually intelligent; and if some day your intelligence discovers that it requires evidence for belief seek for that evidence. It is obtainable. Try to recognise it when you encounter it. … Only, in any event, remember this: never alter your early faith, never destroy your childhood’s belief until evidence to prove the contrary convinces you.”

      “No. … There is no such evidence, is there, father?”

      “I know of none.”

      “Then,” said the girl calmly, “I shall take Christ’s 35 evidence that I shall live again if I do no evil. … Father?”

      “Yes.”

      “Is there any evidence that Adoniram has no soul?”

      “I know of none.”

      “Is there any that he has a soul?”

      “Yes, I think there is.”

      “Are you sure?”

      “Not entirely.”

      “I wonder,” mused the girl, looking gravely at the sleeping cat.

      It was the first serious doubt that Ruhannah had ever entertained in her brief career.

      That night she dreamed of the Yellow Devil in Herr Wilner’s box, and, awaking, remembered her dream. It seemed odd, too, because she had not even thought of the Yellow Devil for over a year.

      But the menacing Mongol figure seemed bound to intrude into her life once more and demand her attention as though resentful of long oblivion and neglect; for, a week later, an old missionary from Indo-China—a native Chinese—who had lectured at the Baptist Church in Gayfield the evening previous, came to pay his respects to the Reverend Wilbour Carew. And Rue had taken the Yellow Devil from the olive-wood box that day and was busily making a pencil drawing of it.

      At sight of the figure the native missionary’s narrow almond eyes opened extremely wide, and he leaned on the table and regarded the bronze demon very intently.

      Then he took from his pocket and adjusted to his button nose a pair of large, horn spectacles; and he carefully examined the Chinese characters engraved on the base of the ancient bronze, following them slowly with a yellow and clawlike forefinger. 36

      “Can you read what is written there?” inquired the Reverend Mr. Carew.

      “Yes, brother. This is what is written: ‘I am Erlik, Ruler of Chaos and of All that Was. The old order passes when I arrive. I bring confusion among the peoples; I hurl down emperors; kingdoms crumble where I pass; the world begins to rock and tip, spilling nations into outer darkness. When there are no more kingdoms and no more kings; no more empires and no emperors; and when only the humble till, the blameless sow, the pure reap; and when only the teachers teach in the shadow of the Tree, and when the Thinker sits unstirring under the high stars, then, from the dark edges of the world I let go my grasp and drop into those immeasurable deeps from which I came—I, Erlik, Ruler of All that Was.’ ”

      After a silence the Reverend Mr. Carew asked whether the figure was a very old one.

      “It is before the period called ‘Han’—a dynasty during which the Mongols were a mighty people. This inscription is Mongol. Erlik was the Yellow Devil of the Mongols.”

      “Not a heathen god, then?”

      “No, a heathen devil. Their Prince of Darkness.”

      Ruhannah, pencil in hand, looked curiously at this heathen Prince of Darkness, arrived out of the dark ages to sit to her for his scowling portrait.

      “I wonder what he thinks of America,” she said, partly to herself.

      The native missionary smiled, picked up the Yellow Devil, shook the figure, listening.

      “There is something inside,” he said; “perhaps jewels. If you drilled a hole in him you could find out.”

      The Reverend Mr. Carew nodded absently: 37

      “Yes; it might be worth while,” he said.

      “If there is a jewel,” repeated the missionary, “you had better take it, then cast away the figure. Erlik brings disaster to the land where his image is set up.”

      The Reverend Mr. Carew smiled at his Chinese and Christian confrère’s ineradicable vein of superstition.

      38

CHAPTER IV

       Table of Contents

THE TRODDEN WAY

       Table of Contents

      There came the indeterminate year when Ruhannah finished school and there was no money available to send her elsewhere for further embellishment, no farther horizon than the sky over the Gayfield hills, no other perspective than the main street of Gayfield with the knitting mill at the end of it.

      So into Gayfield Mill the girl walked, and found a place immediately among the unskilled. And her career appeared to be predetermined now, and her destiny a simple one—to work, to share the toil and the gaieties of Gayfield with the majority of the other girls she knew; to marry, ultimately, some boy, some clerk in one of the Gayfield stores, some farmer lad, perhaps, possibly a school teacher or a local lawyer or physician, or possibly the head of some department in the mill, or maybe a minister—she was sufficiently well bred and educated for any one of these.

      The winter of her seventeenth year found her still very much a child at heart, physically backward, a late adolescent, a little shy, inclined to silences, romantic, sensitive to all beauty, and passionately expressing herself only when curled up by the stove with her pencil and the red light of the coals falling athwart the slim hand that guided it.

      She went sometimes to village parties, learned very easily to dance, had no preferences among the youths 39 of Gayfield, no romances. For that matter, while she was liked and even furtively admired, her slight shyness, reticence, and a vague, indefinite something about her seemed to discourage familiar rustic gallantry. Also, she was as thin and awkward as an overgrown lad, not thought to be pretty, known to be poor. But for all that more than one young man was vaguely haunted at intervals by some memory of her grey eyes and the peculiar sweetness of her mouth, forgetting for the moment several freckles on the delicate bridge of her nose and several more on her sun-tanned cheeks.

      She had an agreeable