The Heavenly Twins by Madame Sarah Grand

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THE HEAVENLY TWINS

BY MADAME SARAH GRAND
AUTHOR OF "IDEALA," ETC. ETC.

"They call us the Heavenly Twins."
"What, signs of the Zodiac?" said the Tenor.
"No; signs of the times," said the Boy.

The time is racked with birth-pangs; every hour
Brings forth some gasping truth, and truth new-born
Looks a misshapen and untimely growth,
The terror of the household and its shame,
A monster coiling in its nurse's lap
That some would strangle, some would starve;
But still it breathes, and passed from hand to hand,
And suckled at a hundred half-clad breasts
Comes slowly to its stature and its form,
Calms the rough ridges of its dragon scales,
Changes to shining locks its snaky hair,
And moves transfigured into Angel guise,
Welcomed by all that cursed its hour of birth,
And folded in the same encircling arms
That cast it like a serpent from their hold!

--_Oliver Wendell Holmes_.

PROEM.

_Mendelssohn's "Elijah."_
[Illustration: (musical notation); lyrics: He, watch-ing o-ver Is--ra--el,
slumbers not, nor sleeps.]

From the high Cathedral tower the solemn assurance floated forth to be a
warning, or a promise, according to the mental state of those whose ears
it filled; and the mind, familiar with the phrase, continued it
involuntarily, carrying the running accompaniment, as well as the words
and the melody, on to the end. After the last reverberation of the last
stroke of every hour had died away, and just when expectation had been
succeeded by the sense of silence, they rang it out by day and night--the
bells--and the four winds of heaven by day and night spread it abroad over
the great wicked city, and over the fair flat country, by many a tiny
township and peaceful farmstead and scattered hamlet, on, on, it was said,
to the sea--to the sea, which was twenty miles away!

But there were many who doubted this; though good men and true, who knew
the music well, declared they had heard it, every note distinct, on summer
evenings when they sat alone on the beach and the waves were still; and it
sounded then, they said, like the voice of a tenor who sings to himself
softly in murmurous monotones. And some thought this must be true, because
those who said it knew the music well, but others maintained that it could
not be true just for that very reason; while others again, although they
confessed that they knew nothing of the distance sound may travel under
special circumstances, ventured, nevertheless, to assert that the chime
the people heard on those occasions was ringing in their own hearts; and,
indeed, it would have been strange if those in whose mother's ears it had
rung before they were born, who knew it for one of their first sensations,
and felt it to be, like a blood relation, a part of themselves, though
having a separate existence, had not carried the memory of it with them
wherever they went, ready to respond at any moment, like sensitive chords
vibrating to a touch.

But everything in the world that is worth a thought becomes food for
controversy sooner or later, and the chime was no exception to the rule.
Differences of opinion regarding it had always been numerous and extreme,
and it was amusing to listen to the wordy warfare which was continually
being waged upon the subject.

There were people living immediately beneath it who wished it far enough,
they said, but they used to boast about it nevertheless when they went to
other places--just as they did about their troublesome children, whom they
declared, in like manner, that they expected to be the death of them when
they and their worrying ways were within range of criticism. It was a
flagrant instance of the narrowness of small humanity which judges people
and things, not on their own merits, but with regard to their effect upon
itself; a circumstance being praised to-day because importance is to be
derived from _its_ importance, and blamed to-morrow because a bilious
attack makes thought on any subject irritating.

Other people liked the idea of the chime, but were not content with its
arrangement; if it had been set in another way, you know, it would have be
so different, they asserted, with as much emphasis as if there were wisdom
in the words. And some said it would have been more effective if it had
not rung so regularly, and some maintained that it owed its power to that
same regularity which suggested something permanent in this weary world of
change. Among the minor details of the discussion there was one point in
particular which exercised the more active minds, but did not seem likely
ever to be settled. It was as to whether the expression given to the
announcement by the bells did not vary at different hours of the day and
night, or at different seasons of the year at all events; and opinion
differed as widely upon this point as we are told they did on one occasion
in some other place with regard to the question whether a fish weighed
heavier when it was dead than when it was alive--a question that would
certainly never have been settled either, had it not happened, after a
long time and much discussion, that someone accidentally weighed a fish,
when it was found there was no difference. The question of expression,
however, could not be decided in that way, expression being imponderable;
and it was pretty generally acknowledged that the truth could not be
ascertained and must therefore remain a matter of opinion. But that did
not stop the talk. Once, indeed, someone declared positively that the
state of a man's feelings at the moment would influence his perceptions,
and make the chimes sound glad when he was glad, and mournful when he was
melancholy; but nobody liked the solution.

Let them wrangle as they might, however, the citizens were proud of their
chime, and for a really good reason. It meant something! It was not a mere
jingle of bells, as most chimes are, but a phrase with a distinct idea in
it which they understood as we understand a foreign language when we can
read it without translating it. It might have puzzled them to put the
phrase into other words, but they had it off pat enough as it stood, and
they held it sacred, which is why they quarrelled about it, it being usual
for men to quarrel about what they hold sacred, as if the thing could only
be maintained by hot insistence--the things they hold sacred, that
is--although they cannot be sure of them, like the forms of a religion
which admit of controversy, as distinguished from the God they desire to
worship about whom they have no doubt, and therefore never dispute.

In this latter respect, however, the case of the people of Morningquest
was just the reverse of that which obtains in most other places, for in
consequence of the hourly insistence of the chime, their most impressive
monitor, they talked much more of Him whom they should worship than of
various ways to worship him; and the most persistent of all the questions
which occupied their attention arose out of the involuntary but continuous
effort of one generation after another to define with scientific accuracy
and to everybody's satisfaction his exact nature and attributes; in
consequence of which efforts there had come to be several most distinct
but quite contradictory ideas upon the subject. There were some
simple-minded folk to whom the chime typified a God essentially masculine,
and like a man, hugely exaggerated, but somewhat amorphous, because they
could not see exactly in what the exaggeration consisted except in the
size of him. They pictured him sitting alone on a throne of ivory and gold
inlaid with precious stones; and recited the catalogue of those mentioned
in the Book of the Revelation by preference as imparting a fine scriptural
flavor to the dea. And he sat upon the throne day and night, looking down
upon the earth, and never did anything else nor felt it monotonous. Buddha
himself, in Nirvana, could not have attained to a greater perfection of
contemplation than that with which they credited this curious divinity,
who served solely for a finish to their mental range as the sky was to
their visual; a useful point at which to aim their rudimentary faculty of
reverence.

But others, again, of a different order of intelligence, had passed beyond
this stage and saw in him more

of a creature
Moving about in worlds not realized;

very like Jove, but unmarried. He was both beneficent and jealous, and had
to be propitiated by regular attendance at church; but further than that
he was not exacting; and therefore they ventured to take his name in vain
when they were angry, and also to call upon him for help, with many
apologies, when there was nobody else to whom they could apply; although,
so long as the current of their lives ran smoothly on, they seldom
troubled their heads about him at all.

There were deeper natures than those, however, who were not content with
this small advance, and these last had by degrees, as suited their
convenience but without perceiving it, gradually discovered in him every
attribute, good, bad, or indifferent, which they found in themselves, thus
ascribing to him a nature of a highly complex and most extraordinarily
inconsistent kind, less that of a God than of a demon. To them he was
still a great shape like a man, but a shape to be loved as well as feared;
a God of peace who patronized war; a gentle lamb who looked on at carnage
complacently; a just God who condemned the innocent to suffer; an
omnipotent God who was powerless to make his law supreme; and they
reserved to themselves the right of constantly adding to or slightly
altering this picture; but having completed it so far, they were
thoroughly well satisfied with it, and, incongruous as it was, they
managed to make it the most popular of all the presentments, partly
because, being so flexible, it could be adjusted to every state of mind;
but also because there was money in it. Numbers of people lived by it, and
made name and fame besides; and these kept it going by damaging anybody
who ventured to question its beauty. For there is no faith that a man
upholds so forcibly as the one by which he earns his livelihood, whether
it be faith in the fetish he has helped to make, or in a particular kind
of leather that sells quickest because it wears out so fast.

In these latter days, however, it began to appear as if the supremacy of
the great masculine idea was at last being seriously threatened, for even
in Morningquest a new voice of extraordinary sweetness had already been
heard, not _his_, the voice of man; but _theirs_, the collective
voice of humanity, which declared that "He, watching," was the
all-pervading good, the great moral law, the spirit of pure love, Elohim,
mistranslated in the book of Genesis as "He" only, but signifying the
union to which all nature testifies, the male and female principles which
together created the universe, the infinite father and mother, without
whom, in perfect accord and exact equality, the best government of nations
has always been crippled and abortive.

Those who heard this final voice were they who loved the chime most truly,
and reverenced it; but they did not speak about it much: only, when the
message sounded, they listened with that full-hearted pleasure which is
the best praise and thanks. Mendelssohn must have felt it when the melody
first occurred to him, and the words had wedded themselves to the music in
his soul!

[Illustration: (musical notation); lyrics: He, watch-ing o-ver Is--ra--el,
slumbers not, nor sleeps.]

And the chime certainly had power to move the hearts of many; but it would
be hard to say when it had most power, or upon whom. Doubtless, the
majority of those who had ears to hear in the big old fashioned city heard
not, use having dulled their faculties; or if, perchance, the music
reached them it conveyed no idea to their minds, and passed unheeded. It
was but an accustomed measure, one more added to the myriad other sounds
that make up the buzz of life, and help, like each separate note of a
chord, to complete the varied murmur which is the voice of "a whole city
full."

But of course there were times when it was specially apt to strike
home--in the early morning, for instance, when the mind was fresh and hope
was strong enough to interpret the assurance into a promise of joy; and
again at noon, when fatigue was growing and the mind perceived a
sympathetic melancholy in the tones which was altogether restful; but it
was at midnight it had most power. It seemed to rise then to the last
pitch of enthusiasm, sounding triumphant, like the special effort that
finishes a strain, as if to speed the departing interval of time; but when
it rang again, after the first hour of the new day, its voice had dropped,
as it were, to that tone of indifference which expresses the accustomed
doing of some monotonous duty which has become too much of a habit to
excite either pleasure or pain. To the tired watcher then, for whom the
notes were mere tones conveying no idea, the soft melancholy cadence,
dulled by distance, was like the half-stifled echo of her own last stifled
sigh.

It is likely, however, that the chime failed less of its effect outside
the city than it did within; but there again it depended upon the hearer.
When the mellow tones floated above the heath where the gipsies camped,
only one, perchance, might listen, lifting her bright eyes with pleasure
and longing in them, dumbly, as a child might, yet showing for a moment
some glimmering promise of a soul. But to many in the village close at
hand the chime brought comfort. It seemed to assure the sick, counting the
slow hours, that they were not forsaken, and helped them to bear their
pain with patience; it seemed to utter to the wayworn a word which told
them their trouble was not in vain; it seemed to invite all those who
waited and were anxious to trust their care to Him and seek repose. It was
all this, and much more, to many people: and yet, when it spread in
another direction over the fields, it meant nothing to the yawning
ploughman, either musical or poetical, had no significance whatever for
him if it were not of the time of day, gathered, however, with the help of
sundry other sensations of which hunger and fatigue were chief. It
probably conveyed as much, and neither more nor less, to the team he
drove.

But perhaps of all the affairs of life with which the chime had mingled,
the most remarkable, could they be collected and recorded, would be the
occasions on which the hearing of the message had marked a turning point
in the career of some one person, as happened, once on a summer afternoon,
when it was heard by a Lancashire collier--a young lad with an unkempt mop
of golden hair, delicate features, and limbs which were too refined for
his calling, who was coming up the River Morne on a barge.

The river winds for a time through a fertile undulating bit of country,
and nothing of the city can be seen until you are almost in it, except the
castle of the Duke of Morningquest, high perched on a hill on the farther
side, and the spire of the cathedral, which might not attract your
attention, however, if it were not pointed out to you above the trees.
When the chime floated over this sparsely peopled tract, filling the air
with music, but coming from no one could tell whence, there was something
mysterious in the sound of it to an imaginative listener in so apparently
remote a place; and once, twice, as the long hours passed, the young
collier heard it ring, and wondered. He had nothing to do but listen, and
watch the man on the bank who led the horse that was towing the barge; or
address a rare remark to his solitary companion--an old sailor, dressed in
a sou'-wester, blue jersey, and the invariable drab trowsers,
tar-besprent, and long boots, of his calling, who steered automatically,
facing the meadows in beautiful abstraction. He would have faced an
Atlantic gale, however, with that same look.

When the chime rang out for the third time, the young collier spoke:

"It's the varse of a song, maybe?" he suggested.

"Aye, lad," was the laconic rejoinder.

The barge moved on--passed a little farmhouse close to the water's edge;
passed some lazy cattle standing in a field flicking off flies with their
tails; passed a patient fisherman, who had not caught a thing that day,
and scarcely expected to, but still fished on. The sun sparkled down on
the water; the weary man and horse plodded along the bank; far away, a
sweet bird sang; and the collier spoke again.

"Dost tha' know the varse?" he said.

The old man had been brought up in those parts; he knew it well; and
slowly repeated it to the lad, who listened without a sign, sitting with
his dreamy eyes fixed on the water:

"He, watching over Israel, slumbers not, nor sleeps."

There was another long silence, and then the lad spoke once more, with
apathetic gravity, asking: "Who's _He?_"

The old man kept his eyes fixed on a distant reach of the river, and moved
no muscle of his face.

"I guess it's Christ," he said at last.

"Ah niver 'eerd tell on 'im," the collier answered slowly.

"Hast 'niver 'eerd tell on Christ?" the old man asked in measured
machine-like tones. "I thowt ivery one know'd on 'im. Why, what religion
are you?"

"Well, me feyther's a Liberal--leastways 'im as brought me up," was the
passionless rejoinder, slowly spoken; "but ah doan't know no one o' the
name o' Christ, an', what's more, ah's sure 'e doan't work down our way,"--
with which he sauntered forward with his hands in his trowser pockets, and
sat in the bow; and the old man steered on as before.

How like a mind is to a river! both may be pure and transparent and
lovable, and strong to support and admirable; each may mirror the beauties
of earth and sky, and still have a wonderful beauty of its own to delight
us; both are always moving onward, bound irresistibly to be absorbed in a
great ocean mystery, to be swept away irreclaimably, without hope of
return, but leaving memories of themselves in good or evil wrought by them;
and both are pure at the outset, but can be contaminated, when they in
turn contaminate; and, being perverted in their use, become accursed, and
curse again with all the more effect because the province of each was to
bless.

The collier lad in the bow of the barge felt something of the fascination
of the river that day. He saw it sparkle in the sunshine, he heard it
ripple along its banks, he felt the slow and dreamy motion of the boat it
bore; and his mind was filled with unaccustomed thought, and a strange
yearning which he did not understand. There was something singularly
attractive about the lad, although his clothes were tattered, his golden
hair and delicate skin were begrimed, his great bright eyes had no
intelligent expression in them, and there was that discontented
undisciplined look about his mouth which is common to uneducated men. He
had no human knowledge, but he had capacity, and he had music, the divine
gift, in his soul, and the voice of an angel to utter it.

What passed through his dim consciousness in the interval which followed
his last remark, no one will ever know; but the chime had once more
sounded; and, suddenly, as he sat there, he took up the strain, and sang
it--and the labourers in the fields, and the loiterers by the river, and
the ladies in their gardens, even the very cattle in the meadows, looked
up and listened, wondering, while he varied the simple melody, as singers
can, finding new meaning in the message, and filling the summer silence
with perfect raptures of ecstatic sound.

It was a voice to gladden the hearts of men, and one who heard it knew
this, and followed the barge, and took the lad and had him taught, so that
in after days the world was ready to fall at his feet and worship the
gift.

And so time passed. Change followed change, but the chime was immutable.
And always, whatever came, it rang out calmly over the beautiful old city
of Morningquest, and entered into it, and was part of the life of it,
mixing itself impartially with the good and evil; with all the sin and
suffering, the pitiful pettiness, the indifference, the cruelty, and every
form of misery-begetting vice, as much as with the purity above reproach,
the charity, the self-sacrifice, the unswerving truth, the patient
endurance, and courage not to be daunted, which are in every city--mixing
itself with these as the light and air of heaven do, and with effects
doubtless as unexpected and as fine; and ready also to be a help to the
helpless, a guide to the rash and straying, a comfort to the comfortless,
a reproach to the reckless, and a warning to the wicked. Perhaps an
ambitious stranger, passing through the city, would hear the chime, and
pause to listen, and in the pause a flash of recollection would show him
the weary way he had gone, the disappointments which were the inevitable
accompaniments of even his most brilliant successes in the years of toil
that had been his since he made the world his idol and swerved from the
Higher Life; and then he would ask himself the good of it all, and finding
that there was no good, he would go his way, cherishing the new
impression, and asking of all things,

"Is it too late now?"

And perhaps at the same moment a lady rolling past in her carriage would
say, "How sweet!" or the beauty of the bells might win some other
thoughtless tribute from her, if she heard the chime at all; but probably
she never heard it, because the accustomed tones were as familiar as the
striking of the hour--the striking of an hour that bore no special
significance for her, and therefore set no chord vibrating in her soul.
The thoughts of her mind deafened her heart to it as completely as the
thunder of a waggon had at the same time deafened the waggoner's ears
while the bells uttered their message above him. And so it was with the
doctor, overworked and anxious, hurrying on his rounds; the grasping
lawyer, absorbed in calculation, and all the other money-grubbers; the
indolent woman, the pleasure-seeker, and the hard-pressed toiler for daily
bread: if they heard they heeded not because their hour had not yet come.
At least this is what some thought, who believed that for every one a
special hour would come, when they would be called, and then left to
decide, as it were, between life and death-in-life; if they accepted life,
the next message would be fraught with strength and help and blessing; but
if they rejected it, the bells would utter their condemnation, and leave
them to their fate.

CONTENTS.

I. CHILDHOODS AND GIRLHOODS

II. A MALTESE MISCELLANY

III. DEVELOPMENT AND ARREST OF DEVELOPMENT

IV. THE TENOR AND THE BOY--AN INTERLUDE

V. MRS. KILROY OF ILVERTHORPE

VI. THE IMPRESSIONS OF DR. GALBRAITH

BOOK I.

CHILDHOODS AND GIRLHOODS.

The spring is the pleasantest of the seasons; and the young of most
animals, though far from being completely fashioned, afford a more
agreeable sensation than the full grown; because the imagination is
entertained with the promise of something more, and does not acquiesce in
the present object of the sense.--_Burke on the Sublime_.

I am inclined to agree with Francis Galton in believing that education and
environment produce only a small effect on the mind of anyone, and that
most of our qualities are innate.--_Darwin_.

THE HEAVENLY TWINS.

CHAPTER I.

At nineteen Evadne looked out of narrow eyes at an untried world
inquiringly. She wanted to know. She found herself forced to put prejudice
aside in order to see beneath it, deep down into the sacred heart of
things, where the truth is, and the bewildering clash of human precept
with human practice ceases to vex. And this not of design, but of
necessity. It was a need of her nature to know. When she came across
something she did not understand, a word, a phrase, or an allusion to a
phase of life, the thing became a haunting demon only to be exorcised by
positive knowledge on the subject. Ages of education, ages of hereditary
preparation had probably gone to the making of such a mind, and rendered
its action inevitable. For generations knowledge is acquired, or, rather,
instilled by force in families, but, once in a way, there comes a child
who demands instruction as a right; and in her own family Evadne appears
to have been that child. Not that she often asked for information. Her
faculty was sufficient to enable her to acquire it without troubling
herself or anybody else, a word being enough on some subjects to make
whole regions of thought intelligible to her. It was as if she only
required to be reminded of things she had learnt before. Her mother said
she was her most satisfactory child. She had been easy of education in the
schoolroom. She had listened to instruction with interest and
intelligence, and had apparently accepted every article of faith in God
and man which had been offered for her guidance through life with
unquestioning confidence; at least she had never been heard to object to
any time-honoured axiom. And she did, in fact, accept them all, but only
provisionally. She wanted to know. Silent, sociable, sober, and sincere,
she had walked over the course of her early education and gone on far
beyond it with such ease that those in authority over her never suspected
the extent to which she had outstripped them.