Rita

“ There are few things of which he is so utterly ignorant, and of which he thinks so little, as that mystery of himself incarnated in the temporary prison-house of flesh and blood. Did he once realise what he might be—did he ever raise his eyes from the glow-worm light of earth to the stupendous glories of the sun of wisdom, he would know better than to cavil at what you call ‘improbable.’ For in nature all things are possible, but man has neither time nor patience to trace out their mysteries, or seek in their development the key to those mysteries. ”

“ Julian Estcourt had learnt his heart’s secret by then, but there was a coldness, a strangeness, about the girl who had been his boyhood’s friend that kept him back from anything bearing the imputation of love-making.
Much as they were together, long and frequent as were their talks, those talks were yet curiously impersonal for their age and sex, and, however much the young man’s heart might throb with its hidden passion, there yet lay between them a barrier, a restraint, light, yet strangely strong, and his lips never dared betray the secret of his long-cherished devotion. ”

“ True, but not selfish love. ‘The feet of the soul must be washed in the blood of the heart.’ Love to all humanity—to the poor—the sad—the suffering. Love, even to the Fate that gives us sorrow and misfortune. Love to the eternal and immutable. Love for all that is purest and best in each life with which we mingle. Such a love is not sensual—not earthly. ”

“ When a proud woman yields to the entreaties of a lover, she yields with a grander humility, a more complete self-surrender, than one to whom coquetry and conquests are natural attributes of vanity.
The Princess Zairoff, to whom men’s admiration was as familiar as the air of Heaven, who possessed rank and wealth and loveliness such as dower few women, had yet never granted to one human being a sign of tenderness, or unveiled, so to speak, the deep strange depths of her strange nature, to any beseechment. ”

“ That light touch thrilled his veins like sorcery. He bent his head and passionately kissed the white, soft hand. “You failed, oh, my Princess! because you are still mortal woman. Thank Heaven for it! You failed because memory and love were still strong in your heart. You failed—and I am by your side once more. Oh, let the past be forgotten! Brief is life, but love is its Paradise, and into that Paradise our feet once strayed. Fate stayed them on the threshold. ”

“ One can never tell; at any time the summons may come again. God help me if it does.”
“Is your life in danger, then?” he asked, and again that chill and horror seemed to thrill the pulses of his beating heart.
“My life!” She lifted her eyes and looked back at his with something intensely mournful in her gaze. “As if that mattered! What is my life to me now, any more than it was then? Did I count the cost—did I call it a sacrifice? Life—the mere material actual life of the body—has never weighed with me for one moment. ”

“ Every life has to live out itself, and work out for itself the higher mysteries that are shut within its own consciousness. No one can do that for it, any more than they could take its love, or its sorrows, or its misfortunes away, and bear them in its place. If humanity took that truth to heart, and lived according to the higher instead of the lower instincts, the world would be a very different place. ”

“ I only repeat what I said yesterday, that no lofty or educated mind could do anything but resent the idea of being subjugated to a mere material will, and being forced by that will to perform conjuring tricks in order that a small portion of the civilised world should gape, and gaze, and cry out ‘How wonderful!’ To deny that spirits exist, aye and work, would be to deny the very crudest faith in Christianity. ”

“ Colonel Estcourt exchanged his evening clothes for the comfort of dressing-gown and slippers, and then threw himself into an easy chair before the fire which was blazing brightly and cheerfully in the grate.
It was the conventional hotel bedroom. A dressing-table stood in the window; the bed, curtained and draped, looked inviting in its corner. A lamp stood on a small table littered with books and papers; an array of pipes and cigar-holders were strewn carelessly on the marble mantelpiece. ”

“ A sense of brightness and commonplace comfort permeated the atmosphere, and were sensibly soothing after the chill of the cool December night.
He took a cigar from his case and lit it, and threw himself back and smoked at his ease.
As he did so, he heard a clock in the distance strike the quarter after midnight; mechanically he counted the strokes. “She will wake now,” he said, half aloud. The sound of his voice startled himself in the stillness of the room. As its echoes died away he glanced nervously round. Then his face paled to the hues of death, his eyes dilated. ”

“ Mrs Jefferson looked highly gratified. “Oh, Madame Zairoff,” she cried, “I’d give up everything in the world to have your wonderful gifts.”
“Even Worth’s gowns?” said the princess, smiling. “What about the pleasant vanities we talked so much about?”
“Oh, bother the vanities. I’ve found out life can be much more interesting than when it’s merely frivolous,” said the American, heartily. “Is there anything I could do to become an occultist?”
Colonel Estcourt laughed outright.
“My dear Mrs Jefferson,” he said, “the life is not by any means easy, or gratifying. ”

“ And having long ago learnt that arguments were utterly useless before that formula, he had to stand aside—to crush back a strong and unconquerable passion—to see her pass from his sight and knowledge—and to bear his life as best he could, with that feeling in his heart of having staked all on one throw, and lost, that makes so many men desperate and vicious. ”

“ They say to you, oh Poet, ‘Perfect those gifts of your higher nature—yet be not of them vainglorious, since, humanly speaking, they are not yours, but lent for a purpose, and the brief space of earth-life.’ Look upon every beautiful thought, every gift of expression, as the direction of One who has dowered you with the possibility of opening other eyes to the beauty, and other minds to the understanding of such expression. ”

“ Does a ball amuse? Does a dinner-party? Does even a comedy, after the first quarter of an hour? I can answer for myself in the negative, at all events.”
“Gracious!” exclaimed Mrs Jefferson wonderingly. “You must be a strange person, and you look so young. Why, I should have thought you were just the age for society? Don’t you care to be admired?”
“Not in the least. I have learnt the value of men’s passions. A quiet life is more wholesome and infinitely more contenting than anything society can offer.” ”

“ As for your last remark about endeavouring to steal a march on our fellow-men by seeking a higher place in the next state of existence, before we have done with this, I can only ask you to study something of the laws and doctrines of theosophical philosophy before deciding such an event is possible.”
“Do you know much about them?” asked Mrs Jefferson curiously.
“I know that they teach man the truest sense of his own responsibility. They prove to him an inexorable law by which he may lift himself from the level of the brute to the majesty of the God he now blindly worships.” ”

“ It may be noticed that Mrs Ray Jefferson had only heard of a sculptor and a musician, but she drifted into plurality by force of that irresistible tendency to exaggerate trifles which seems inherent in women who are given to scandal even in its mildest form.
People from all parts of the room gathered round her. A few seemed inclined to doubt her description of the stranger’s personal charms, but when she applied to Mrs Masterman for confirmation, that lady, who was known to have a strict regard for truth in its most uncompromising form, emphatically agreed with her. ”

“ There can be no high order of morality without this sense of responsibility, for when a man feels he is moulding his own character, forming, as it were, fresh links in the chain of endurance, adding by every act and thought and word to that personality he is bound to confront as himself, to re-inhabit as himself, and to judge as himself, then life rises into an importance that words cannot convey, but which the soul alone recognises and feels in those better moments that are mercifully granted to each and all of us. ”

“ I have always that dread upon my soul, that I am destined to bring you suffering—misfortune—”
“Bring me what you will,” he interrupted passionately, “but do not speak of parting! Rather suffering and trial at your hands, oh, my life’s love, than the greatest peace and prosperity from any other woman’s!” ”

“ Mrs Ray Jefferson met their gaze, and was conscious of an odd little unaccountable thrill.
“Certainly I do,” she said. “Who could believe that anyone can jump in or out of their skin just as the fancy takes them?”
The stranger’s beautiful lips grew scornful. “Oh!” she said, “if you like to put the subject in that light, it may well look ridiculous and impossible. Ignorance is always more or less arrogant. It is man’s habit to fancy that all creation was made for him. ”

“ Princess Zairoff, however, assured them she had no intention of proselytising. “It is quite true I am deeply interested in this subject,” she said, “but I should be sorry to bore you all with my views, or the reasons for my holding those views. Psychic inquiry demands a great deal more than cursory study. There are many mysteries of nature that men have looked upon as enigmas, until patience and research have solved them for them. Then they marvel how they could have been blind so long! Magnetism, spiritualism, and clairvoyance have all their mystical, as well as their explicable, side. ”

“ I don’t believe in the voice of man barring the way to inquiry. God made man, and, as far as I have ever been able to learn, He made them all on one pattern. The offices and dignities they give themselves won’t make them one whit greater or more important in His eyes.”
“You are a democrat, I see,” said the beautiful woman, looking gravely and scrutinisingly at the eager flushed face, with its ruffled damp curls, and quick restless eyes.
“Well,” said Mrs Jefferson, “I don’t exactly know what I am. My views are liberal on most subjects. ”

“ I always thought gout meant large lumps, and swellings of the joints.”
“So it does,” said Mrs Jefferson, with an involuntary glance at the moist and crimson sufferer on her right. “But my form of it is different. It is much worse, but no one sympathises with me because it doesn’t look so bad as the other gout.”
“It is not often that people do sympathise with illness,” said the beautiful woman. “When we ourselves are well, we think suffering can’t be so very great after all, and when we are ill we are quite sure no one else has to bear so much pain. Human nature is essentially selfish. ”

“ Oh listen—listen, and let the woman defy the priestess. Give me your love, and, even with Death as its bridal gift I shall receive it as the deepest joy of earth.”
“There,” she said sadly, “speaks the mortal. Passion sways your senses. You too will lose your powers—and for what?—a few brief years of joy—a longer darkness—then the old weary round—the old sad effort to climb the long stairway from the bottom rung that once you proudly spurned. ”

“ When the Princess Zairoff was in the privacy of her own boudoir, she turned to Colonel Estcourt in a sudden appeal:
“Why did you make me go, Julian?” she said. “I knew I should only shock them. I can’t ever put up with that languid ignorant curiosity.”
“I think it will do them good to be shocked,” he said, with a smile. “Give them something to think of beside their ailments. And I had a special reason,” he went on with a deeper note of tenderness in his voice—“I do not wish you to shut yourself away as you have been doing. You will grow morbid and dissatisfied with life. ”

“ We find ourselves in this world, and we must do as others do, and live as others live. Of course, I’ve read of people giving up all sorts of pleasures and comforts in this life for sake of another, but to me it seems only a mild form of madness. For instance, there’s this new sect that’s sprung up, who are going to revolutionise all creation—well, I’ve read heaps of their books, I’ve spoken even to some of their members, but I confess Theosophy seems as much of a jumble as any other creed. ”

“ Even the savage has it. If we call it human nature to eat, drink, fight, love, or desire, it must also be human nature that gives universal assent to this idea of an after existence. The fact of finding it in all races is but a proof that Man is the creation of a Power that intends him for a far wider range of existence than he sees before him. There are many things affirmed by man’s consciousness that he cannot really or logically explain. Yet it is a narrow reasoning that bids us reject the inexplicable.”
“Yet you reject spiritualism,” said Mrs Jefferson quickly. ”

“ For nothing is so pitiful and so abhorrent, as the worship of wealth, and the selfishness that eats like a corroding poison into the purer metal of the rich man’s nature. Your wealth will only bring you happiness in so far as you use it to benefit others less fortunate though equally deserving. ”

“ Some truths you have learned, but in the passage through your mind they take the colour and shape of a distorted and embittered fancy. You have a work to do, and influence to do it; but your will must become humble, and then you will learn the sweets of true knowledge, and be able to disseminate truth and wisdom. ”

“ Believe me, no—they dress for critics, the critics of their own sex, who with one contemptuous glance can sweep a toilette into insignificance, and make its wearer miserable, or, by some envious approbation, are reluctantly compelled to bestow on it the seal of success.
Is it for men, think you, that those delicate nuances and tints and shades are harmonised and put together? ”