University of Virginia Library

SCENE II

[Castle Tourbillon.]
COUNT ABDIEL.
Dispatches, Prince, from your late kingdom, lie,
Awaiting your good will.

LUCIFER.
Attend this maiden,
And show her what is now my only Realm.
This is Count Abdiel, who my exile shares,
Albeit he frowns upon the fantasies
That make my life a willing banishment.
I will rejoin you shortly.

ABDIEL.
A fair flower,
Culled on the mountain side; a shepherdess,
Carrying her own credentials. Let the lamb
Bleat at our heels.

EVE.
It can remain without.

ABDIEL.
Nay, let it follow; all things enter here.
Nor moat nor drawbridge nor portcullis fence
This Castle from the common air; 'tis free
To foot of man or beast. Withal, none come.
Brighten the Castle with your presence; yours
Is the first voice its walls have listened to,
Save those who dwell within them.

EVE.
O, how grand!

ABDIEL.
There is no grandeur here: Prince Lucifer
Loves but the simple and the primitive.
Why should a man whose fancy hath forsworn
The pomp and palaces of birth, annex
The tricks of splendour to his solitude?
The purple of the mountains robes his mind;
He's a philosopher.

EVE.
And what is that?

ABDIEL.
A houseless stranger in a well-roofed world,
A whimsical refuser of man's needs,
A system-seeker in a round of chance,
A palimpsest of wisdom,—O so wise,
That all our wants are folly, all our passions
Mere matter for conclusions. To despise
What others cherish,—that's philosophy.

EVE.
I do not understand.

ABDIEL.
No more do I.
Philosophers were not philosophers,
If common wisdom apprehended them.
Withal, he has this virtue: Though his brain,
As doth become its loftiness, abides
Within the curling fleeces of the mist,
The meetest maiden on the mountain side,
Yourself, or any sister of your choice,
Hath not a simpler heart.

EVE.
Then he is good.
I felt he was. He has a gentle voice.

ABDIEL.
Is gentleness then goodness? Instruments
Are good or bad according as they do
The work they were conceived for. Gentleness—
Well, heed me not. To fling a Realm away,
Because you have a maggot in your skull,
Is goodness topsy-turvy.

EVE.
But what Realm
Has he relinquished? Is it great, and rich?

ABDIEL.
The greatest in the world; a Realm whose roots
Grip the round globe, and draw their sustenance
From intervening continents: a Throne
Propped by the feet of couchëd centuries;
Older than oldest oaks, old as the sea,
And once as changeless. Faith, authority,
Reversions from the Past, invested awe,
Which none can squander, were its revenue.
And last, the crown of these, humility,
That wisdom of the heart, which reconciles
Life's contradictions with content, confirmed
His people in perpetual loyalty.

EVE.
Did they rebel?

ABDIEL.
If precedent rebel
'Gainst innovation, then they rebels were.
But if to take experience by the beard
And gird at its gray wisdom justify
The brand of insurrection, it was he,
Not they, that was the rebel. But I point
A joke too gravely. 'Tis a humorous world:
Not here among the mountains; they are grim,
And understand not laughter; Nature has
No sense of humour;—but where man abides,
O then grotesqueness balances chagrin,
And keeps life even.

EVE.
When you laugh, I hate you.
You speak to me in riddles, but I see
You love him not.

ABDIEL.
Not love him! Wherefore then
Share I his exile? Had I loved him less,
I might have worn his Crown, that empty waits
But for the head to fit it. What is love,
But faithful pity, tender tolerance
For every foible and fatuity?
Yet love's the sheerest folly of them all,
And you must let me laugh that fool away,
Or I should find his sighs unbearble.

EVE.
Perplex me not. I am a simple maiden.

ABDIEL.
Nothing so dangerous as simplicity.
Know all, fear nothing.

EVE.
Father Gabriel
Speaks from another text. But tell me plain,
Is it for conscience' sake Prince Lucifer
Leaves the Throne vacant? Did he give up much?

ABDIEL.
Yes, he relinquished all that men desire,
The pinnacles of pomp, the purple couch,
The craning of the neck, the bended knee,
And sinuous train of eager servitors.
Life was for him a well-stocked market-place,
Where he could buy all stuffs of happiness
Cheap for a smile. Wealth pressed its goods upon him,
And beauty from its winsome wares removed
The veil of prohibition, and exclaimed,
Behold and take! All these he forfeited,
To have a windy Castle on a hill,
Below the snow-line.

EVE.
Now you sneer again.
And yet the tale sounds noble.

ABDIEL.
Books, books, books.
Books and bare walls are all I have to show.
'Tis less a Castle than a library.

EVE.
Where is the Chapel?

ABDIEL.
On the snowy peaks,
In the long aisles of interlacing pines,
The dim religious light of hushed ravines,
And overhanging dome of spangled Heaven.
We are philosophers; we do not kneel
At carven altars in our orisons.
Our holy-water is the morning dew,
Welled in the stoups of purple crocuses,
Our lamps the meteors of the dreaming night,
And silent darkness is our sanctuary.
The musk-rose is our thurible, and fumes
Invisible of incense float around
The shrine of our devotion. Every throat
In bush or glade, ether or lonely moor,
Enlisted is our chorister, and sings
Matins at dawn, vespers and lauds at eve,
And benediction always. When we need
The organ's diapason, then the stops
Of whirlwind and of thunder surge and roll
With awful usurpation of the soul,
That crouching trembles. This our ritual;
And with this floating immaterial creed
So skilfully we fish, we mean to hook
The gross and greedy gullets of mankind.
How like you our Evangel?

EVE.
Earth and air,
I have been taught, are but God's tabernacle.
Therefore you worship freely nor amiss.

ABDIEL.
Or if that airy Gospel leave you lean,
We have another, warranted to drive
The soul in blinkers, that it may not heed
What it descries but dimly, but trot straight,
It knows not whither, with its load of life,
Fate flourishing the whip. A solid Creed,
Whose priests force matter to confessional,
And make it own what secret pranks it plays
With its confederate, force. Laws, sequences,
Inductions, formulas that never fail,—
This side the grave,—are mass and breviary
For its stern devotees. Who want to know
More of the stars than what their distances,
The pace they travel and the path they keep,
Are curious fools and witless heretics.

EVE.
Why do you mock me?

ABDIEL.
You I did not mock,
But truth is mockery, faithfully discharged;
And if your feelings lie across its track,
Why, then it wounds you. This, our other Creed,
Converts you not? And yet—and yet—the world
Is walked by men who hug it to their hearts,
And deem it sacramental.

Eve, perceiving an image of the Madonna, with an unlit lamp hanging before it, falls on her knees.]
EVE.
Mother mine!

[She prays in silence. Prince Lucifer re-enters, and gazes at her, till she rises.]
EVE.
Why hangs the lamp unlit before Her face,
Face that should never unillumined be,
Or day or night?

LUCIFER.
Kindle the lamp and come,
Come night or day, to see that still it burns,
The pledge of your return.

[He lights a taper and gives it to her, and she lights the lamp.]
LUCIFER.
I will attend you
Back to your flock.

EVE.
No, thitherward, alone
Let me descend. But if no altar here
Provides you worship, will you not repair
Down to our lowly chapel in the vale,
Where Father Gabriel ministers?

LUCIFER.
Where you pray,
There will I come. God wend you!

[Eve descends the mountain alone.]
THE VISP-THAL TORRENT.