"Thee's a reckless little fire-eater!" said David, watching his figure as it appeared and disappeared. "How youth trifles with forces whose powers it can neither measure nor control! It was well that I drew a furrow around our cabin or it would have been burned."

His gaze was fixed on the little cabin which seemed to dance and oscillate in the palpitating light; and touched by the a.n.a.logies and symbols which his penetrating eye discovered in the simple scenes of daily life, he continued to soliloquize, saying, "I should have drawn furrows around my life, before I played with fire!"

"Nay, David," replied Pepeeta, "we should never have played with fire at all."

"How wise we are--too late!"

"Shall we walk any more cautiously when the next untried pathway opens?"

he added, somewhat sadly, as he recalled the errors of the past.

"We ought to, if experience has any value," said Pepeeta.

"But has it? Or does it only interpret the past, and not point out the future?"

"Something of both, I think."

"Well we must trust it."

"But not it alone. There is something, better and safer."

"What is that, my love?"

"The path-finding instinct of the soul itself."

"Do you believe there is such an instinct?"

"As much as I believe the carrier pigeon has it. It is the inner light of which you told me. You see, I remember my lesson like an obedient child."

"Why, then, are we so often misled?" he asked, tempting her.

"Because we do not wholly trust it!" she said.

"But how can we distinguish the true light from the false, the instinct from imagination or desire? If the soul has a hundred compa.s.ses pointing in different ways, what compa.s.s shall lead the bewildered mariner to know the true compa.s.s?"

"He who will know, can know."

"Are you speaking from your heart, Pepeeta?"

"From its depths."

"And have you no doubts that what you say is true?"

"None, for I learned it from a teacher whom I trust, and have justified it by my own experience."

"And now the teacher must sit at the feet of the pupil! Oh! beautiful instructress, keep your faith firm for my sake! I have dark hours through which I have to pa.s.s and often lose my way. The restoration of my spiritual vision is but slow. How often am I bewildered and lost! My thoughts brood and brood within me!"

"Put them away," she said, cheerily. "We live by faith and not by sight.

We need not be concerned with the distant future. Let us live in this dear, divine moment. I am here. You are here! We are together; our hands touch; our eyes meet; our hearts are one; we love! Let us only be true to our best selves, and to the light that shines within! Oh! I have learned so much in these few months, among these people of peace, David!

They know the way of life! We need go no farther to seek it. It lies before us. Let us follow it!"

"Angel of goodness," he exclaimed, clasping her hand, "it must be that supreme Love reigns over all the folly and madness of life, or to such a one as I, a gift so good and beautiful would never have been given!"

She pressed his hand for response, for her lips quivered and her heart was too full for words.

And now, through the ghastly light which magnified his size portentously and painted him with grotesque and terrible colors, the child reappeared, begrimed with smoke and wild with the transports of a power so vast and an accomplishment so wonderful.

The three figures stood in the bright illumination, fascinated by the spectacle. The flames, as if satisfied with destruction, had died down, and fifty great beds of glowing embers lay spread out before them, like a sort of terrestrial constellation.

The wind, which had been awakened and excited to madness as it rushed in from the great halls of the forest to fan the fires, now that it was no longer needed, ceased to blow and sank into silence and repose. Little birds, returning to their roosts, complained mournfully that their dreams had been disturbed, and a great owl from the top of a lofty elm hooted his rage.

It was Sat.u.r.day night. The labors of the week were over. The time had come for them to return to the farm house. They turned away reluctantly, leaving nature to finish the work they had begun.

CHAPTER x.x.xVI.

THE SUPREME TEST

"Not in the clamor of the crowded street, Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, But in ourselves, are triumph and defeat."

--Longfellow.

The emotions of the woodsman's heart had been in the main cheerful and full of hope during the springtime and the summer; but when the autumn came, with its wailing winds, its dying vegetation, and falling leaves, new moods were superinduced in his sensitive soul.

It is impossible even for the good and innocent to behold this universal dissolution and decay without remembering that they themselves must pa.s.s through some such temporary experience. But upon those who carry guilty secrets in their hearts these impressions descend with crushing weight.

David felt them to the full when at last the winter set in; when the days were shortened and he was compelled to forego his toil at an early hour and retire to his cabin! There he was confronted by all the problems and temptations of a soul battling with the animal nature and striving to emanc.i.p.ate the spirit from its thraldom.

At the close of one cold, bl.u.s.tering day, when his evening meal had been eaten in solitude, he sat down before the great fire which roared in the chimney. He read awhile, but grew tired of his book and threw it down.

The melancholy which he had suppressed so long rose at last, and there burst on him the apparent uselessness of the task he had gratuitously a.s.signed himself. Why had he ever done it? Why should he be sitting there alone in his cabin when by his side there might be that radiant woman whose presence would dispel instantly and forever the loneliness which ceaselessly gnawed at his heart? What, after all, was to be gained by this self-sacrifice? Life is very short, and there are few pleasures to be had, at best. Why should he not seize them as fast as they came within his reach? Had he not suffered enough already? Who had ever suffered more? It was only an unnecessary cruelty that had even suggested such agony as he was now experiencing. He was being cheated out of legitimate pleasures, and that by the advice of an old ascetic whose own capacity for enjoyment had been dried up, and who was envious of the happiness of others! As these thoughts rushed through his soul, he could not but perceive that he had been forced once more to enter the arena and to fight over the old battle which he had lost in the lumberman's cabin three years before! And he found to his dismay how much harder it was to fight these foes of virtue when they come to us not as vague imaginations of experiences which we have never tried, but as vivid memories of real events. Then he had only dreamed of the sweet fruits of the knowledge of good and evil: but now the taste was in his mouth, to whet his appet.i.te and increase his hunger. The slumbering selfhood of his soul woke and clamored for its rights.

It was Chateaubriand who affirmed that the human heart is like one of those southern pools which are quiet and beautiful on the surface, but in the bottom of which there lies an alligator! However calm the surface of the exile's soul appeared, there was a monster in its depth, and now it rose upon him. In his struggles with it he paced the floor, sank despairingly into his chair, and fell on his knees by turns. Animal desires and brute instincts grappled with intellectual convictions and spiritual aspirations; flesh and blood with mind and spirit; skepticism with trust; despair with hope.

The old forest had been the theater of many combats. In earth, air and water, birds, animals and fishes had struggled with each other for supremacy and existence. Beasts had fought with Indians and Indians with white men; but no battle had been more significant or tragic than the one which was taking place in the quiet cabin. There was no noise and no bloodshed, but it was a struggle to the death. It was no new strife, but one which has repeated itself in human hearts since they began to beat.

It cannot be avoided by plunging into the crowds of great cities, nor by fleeing to the solitudes of forests, for we carry our battleground with us. The inveterate foes encamp upon the fields, and when they are not fighting they are recuperating their strength for struggles still to come.

But although neither combatant in this warfare is ever wholly annihilated, there is in every life a Waterloo. There comes a struggle in which, if we are not victorious, we at least remain permanent master of the field. This was the night of David's Waterloo. A true history of that final conflict in the soul of this hermit would not have disgraced the confessions of Saint Augustine!

He wrestled to keep his thoughts pure and his faith firm, until the sweat stood in beads on his forehead. He felt that to yield so much as the fraction of an inch of ground in his battle against doubt and sin this night was to be lost! And still the conflict went against him.

It turned upon another of those trivial incidents of which there had been a series in his life. His attention was arrested by a sound in the woods which summoned his consciousness from the inner world of thought and feeling to the great external world of action and endeavor. His huntsman's ear detected its significance at once, and springing to the corner of the room he seized his rifle, threw open the cabin door and stood on the threshold. A full moon shone on the snow and in that white and ghostly light his quick eye caught sight of a spectacle that made his pulses leap. A fawn bounded out into the open field and headed for his cabin, attracted by the firelight gleaming through the window and door. Behind her and snapping almost at her heels, came a howling pack of a half dozen wolves whose red, lolling tongues, white fangs and flaming eyes were distinctly visible from where he stood. Coolly raising his rifle he aimed at the leader and pulled the trigger. There was a quick flash, a sharp report, and the wolf leaped high in the air, plunged headlong, tumbled into the snow, and lay writhing in the pangs of death.

There was no time to load again, and there was no need, for the terrified fawn, impelled by the instinct of self-preservation, chose the lesser of two dangers and with a few wild bounds toward the cabin, flung herself through the wide-open door.

David had detected her purpose and stepped aside; and instantly she had entered closed and bolted the door upon the very muzzles of her pursuers. They dashed themselves against it and whined with baffled rage, while the half-frantic deer crawled trembling to the side of her preserver, licked his hands and lay at his feet gasping for breath.

To some men an incident like this would have been an incident and nothing more; but souls like Corson's perceive in every event and experience of life, elements which lie beneath the surface.

Not only was he saved from the spiritual defeat of which he was on the verge, by being summoned instantly from the subjective into the objective world; but the rescue of the deer became a beautiful and holy symbol of life itself, and so revealed and ill.u.s.trated life's main end "the help of the helpless,"--that he was at once elevated from a region of struggle and despair into one of triumph and hope. He remained in it until he fell asleep. He awoke in it on the morrow. From that high plane he did not again descend so low as he had been. The courage that had been kindled and the purposes which had been crystallized by the joy of this rescue and the grat.i.tude of the deer remained permanently in his heart. He lived in dreams of other acts like this, in which the objects saved by his strength were not the beasts of the field, but the hunted and despairing children of a heavenly Father.