Part 11 (1/2)
”The tenth bird trapped since sunrise,” he said, thinking how shrewd and how sure in their make were these traps of twine that he set in the gra.s.s and the leaves.
She said nothing; but the darkness of disgust swept over her face, as he came in sight in the distance.
She knelt down and sc.r.a.ped a hole in the earth; and laid moss in it, and put the mavis softly on its green and fragrant bier, and covered it with handfuls of fallen rose leaves, and with a sprig or two of thyme.
Around her head the widowed thrush flew ceaselessly, uttering sad cries;--who now should wander with him through the sunlight?--who now should rove with him above the blossoming fields?--who now should sit with him beneath the boughs hearing the sweet rain fall between the leaves?--who now should wake with him whilst yet the world was dark, to feel the dawn break ere the east were red, and sing a welcome to the unborn day?
And, indeed, to those who are alive to the nameless, universal, eternal soul which breathes in all the gra.s.ses of the fields, and beams in the eyes of all creatures of earth and air, and throbs in the living light of palpitating stars, and thrills through the young sap of forest trees, and stirs in the strange loves of wind-borne plants, and hums in every song of the bee, and burns in every quiver of the flame, and peoples with sentient myriads every drop of dew that gathers on a harebell, every bead of water that ripples in a brook--to these the mortal life of man can seem but little, save at once the fiercest and the feeblest thing that does exist; at once the most cruel and the most impotent; tyrant of direst destruction and bondsman of lowest captivity.
Hence, pity entered very little into his thoughts at any time; the perpetual torture of life did indeed perplex him, as it perplexes every thinking creature, with wonder at the universal bitterness that taints all creation, at the universal death whereby all forms of life are nurtured, at the universal anguish of all existence which daily and nightly a.s.sails the unknown G.o.d in piteous protest at the inexorable laws of inexplicable miseries and mysteries. But because such suffering was thus universal, therefore he almost ceased to feel pity for it; of the two he pitied the beasts far more than the human kind:--the horse staggering beneath the lash in all the feebleness of hunger, lameness, and old age; the ox bleeding from the goad on the hard furrows, or stumbling through the hooting crowd, blind, footsore, and s.h.i.+vering, to its last home in the slaughter-house; the dog, yielding up its n.o.ble life inch by inch under the tortures of the knife, loyally licking the hand of the vivisector while he drove his probe through its quivering nerves; the unutterable h.e.l.l in which all these gentle, kindly, and long-suffering creatures dwelt for the pleasure or the vanity, the avarice or the brutality of men,--these he pitied perpetually, with a tenderness for them that was the softest thing in all his nature.
”There lived once in the East, a great king; he dwelt far away, amongst the fragrant fields of roses, and in the light of suns that never set.
”He was young, he was beloved, he was fair of face and form; and the people, as they hewed stone, or brought water, said amongst themselves, 'Verily, this man is as a G.o.d; he goes where he lists, and he lies still or rises up as he pleases; and all fruits of all lands are culled for him; and his nights are nights of gladness, and his days, when they dawn, are all his to sleep through or spend as he wills.' But the people were wrong. For this king was weary of his life.
”His buckler was sown with gems, but his heart beneath it was sore. For he had been long bitterly hara.s.sed by foes who descended on him as wolves from the hills in their hunger, and he had been long plagued with heavy wars and with bad rice harvests, and with many troubles to his nation that kept it very poor, and forbade him to finish the building of new marble palaces, and the making of fresh gardens of delight, on which his heart was set. So he, being weary of a barren land and of an empty treasury, with all his might prayed to the G.o.ds that all he touched might turn to gold, even as he had heard had happened to some magician long before in other ages. And the G.o.ds gave him the thing he craved; and his treasury overflowed. No king had ever been so rich, as this king now became in the short s.p.a.ce of a single summer-day.
”But it was bought with a price.
”When he stretched out his hand to gather the rose that blossomed in his path, a golden flower scentless and stiff was all he grasped. When he called to him the carrier-dove that sped with a scroll of love words across the mountains, the bird sank on his breast a carven piece of metal. When he was athirst and shouted to his cupbearer for drink, the red wine ran a stream of molten gold. When he would fain have eaten, the pulse and the pomegranate grew alike to gold between his teeth. And lo!
at eventide, when he sought the silent chambers of his harem, saying, 'Here at least shall I find rest,' and bent his steps to the couch whereon his best-beloved slave was sleeping, a statue of gold was all he drew into his eager arms, and cold shut lips of sculptured gold were all that met his own.
”That night the great king slew himself, unable any more to bear this agony; since all around him was desolation, even though all around him was wealth.
”Now the world is too like that king, and in its greed of gold it will barter its life away.
”Look you,--this thing is certain--I say that the world will perish, even as that king perished, slain as he was slain, by the curse of its own fulfilled desire.
”The future of the world is written. For G.o.d has granted their prayer to men. He has made them rich, and their riches shall kill them.
”When all green places have been destroyed in the builder's l.u.s.t of gain:--when all the lands are but mountains of brick, and piles of wood and iron:--when there is no moisture anywhere; and no rain ever falls:--when the sky is a vault of smoke; and all the rivers reek with poison:--when forest and stream, and moor and meadow, and all the old green wayside beauty are things vanished and forgotten:--when every gentle timid thing of brake and bush, of air and water, has been killed because it robbed them of a berry or a fruit:--when the earth is one vast city, whose young children behold neither the green of the field nor the blue of the sky, and hear no song but the hiss of the steam, and know no music but the roar of the furnace:--when the old sweet silence of the country-side, and the old sweet sounds of waking birds, and the old sweet fall of summer showers, and the grace of a hedgerow bough, and the glow of the purple heather, and the note of the cuckoo and cushat, and the freedom of waste and of woodland, are all things dead, and remembered of no man:--then the world, like the Eastern king, will perish miserably of famine and of drought, with gold in its stiffened hands, and gold in its withered lips, and gold everywhere:--gold that the people can neither eat nor drink, gold that cares nothing for them, but mocks them horribly:--gold for which their fathers sold peace and health, and holiness and liberty:--gold that is one vast grave.”
The earth is crowded full with clay G.o.ds and false prophets, and fresh legions for ever arriving to carry on the old strife for supremacy; and if a man pa.s.s unknown all the time that his voice is audible, and his hand visible, through the sound and smoke of the battle, he will dream in vain of any remembrance when the gates of the grave shall have closed on him and shut him for ever from sight.
When the world was in its youth, it had leisure to treasure its recollections; even to pause and look back, and to see what flower of a fair thought, what fruit of a n.o.ble art it might have overlooked or left down-trodden.
But now it is so old, and is so tired; it is purblind and heavy of foot; it does not notice what it destroys; it desires rest, and can find none; nothing can matter greatly to it; its dead are so many that it cannot count them; and being thus worn and dulled with age, and suffocated under the weight of its innumerable memories, it is very slow to be moved, and swift--terribly swift--to forget.
Why should it not be?
It has known the best, it has known the worst, that ever can befall it.
And the prayer that to the heart of a man seems so freshly born from his own desire, what is it on the weary ear of the world, save the same old old cry which it has heard through all the ages, empty as the sound of the wind, and for ever--for ever--unanswered?