When the night drew on, Atmâ went away. In thought Bertram followed him, full of sad solicitude.
He strode along the heights. The cooling air and the sense of isolation were grateful to his worn spirit. He wandered far until he found himself in a rocky fortress, vast, black and terrible. The lowering peaks above inclined their giant heads to one another in awful conclave, and the ghastly moonbeams pierced to the gloom below, where they enwrapped the lonely form of Atmâ in a phosphorescent glare. The winds broke among the cliffs, and with shrieks and fearful laughter proclaimed the dark councils of the peaks, and in the din were heard mutterings and imprecations. A transport seized the soul of Atmâ. The horrible glee of the night awoke wrath, and he hurled defiance to the mocking winds.
CHAPTER XIX.
The quiet days were passing slowly. Bertram's wound did not heal, and his strength grew less. The unseen powers that throng the air and watch our ways arranged about him the phantasmagoria of dissolution. It was the waning of the moon. A tender mist, which had long veiled a mountain crest, now unfolded its depths and was wafted away. A star shot across the welkin and was no more seen. Summer blossoms faded with the dying season. The music of the pine-boughs had a more melancholy cadence, and birds of passage took their flight. Atmâ marked these things, and often withdrew to lament.
One evening they watched the shadows lengthening. Atmâ's heart was oppressed, but Bertram looked on the shifting scene with happy undaunted smile. In voice pathetic only from mortal weakness and strong with immortality he said:
CHAPTER XX.
Death, whether it be day or night, overtook Bertram in the mountain fastness, and Atmâ knew once more that the human soul is lonely, which he had been fain to doubt or deny in the pleasant delusion of friendship. He lived alone, and, after a while, with returning mental health, he sometimes gave way to bitter reflection on these, his wasted days, though knowing himself unable still to take up the broken thread of active existence. But, growing stronger, he was at last able to perceive that this apparently barren season was the best harvest time of his life, for, adrift from human ties and from religions, he was at last alone with God. His battles were sore to fight, the solid earth seemed gone from beneath his feet, and the heavens were become an illusion. There was a time when he cried out that "all men are liars," as we have all cried, but the instinct of the soul happily arrested him then. Happily, for it is strangely true that he who loses faith in man will soon lose faith in God. It is as if the great heart of the Racé, recoiling from suicidal impulse, warned the individual from treason against his kind—a suggestion of the unity underlying all created things. This the best religions have known, and have founded on it a law that he who loves God must love his brother also. Apprehending this, Atmâ grew again in heart to forgive his fellowmen who had so sorely sinned against him, and, musing on their ways he pitied them, and knew that the true attitude towards humanity is one of pity. He pitied men in their crimes, in their unbeliefs, and in their faiths, and presently he saw in these faiths which he had decried a spiritual beauty. His own creed, grown hateful to him as the vainest of delusions, reasserted its claims to reverence, and the voice that had cried to his childhood out of the desert of silence and mystery that surrounds every human soul spoke to him again as a voice of inspiration. Every man's faith is the faith of his fathers, the faith learned on his mother's knee. He, who, increasing knowledge, discerns the different degrees of darkness that characterize our religious theories, and chooses for himself one from among them, increases his soul's sorrow, for our light is darkness, and God is not to be found for searching. "It is not by our feet or change of place that men leave Thee nor return unto Thee." The quietness of habit is more conducive to spirituality than the progress whose gain is so infinitesimal, and whose heavy price is the destruction of the habit of faith. It is better to believe a falsehood than to doubt a truth. The habitual attitude of the soul, its upward gaze is more important than the quality of the veil through which it discerns the Eternal. During the days when Atmâ lived without the religion which was so mortal that it died in his heart because he found that its friends were false, he knew God, for this veil was removed, and when the weakness of human nature again demanded the support of habit and formula, he turned to the mystic rites and prayers endeared and hallowed by association, but he knew now that God is a spirit, for spirit with spirit had met. A silence, born of great reverence, rested upon him, and he no more clamoured to save the world. The fall of the Khalsa no longer meant the downfall of God, and in time even the heartache for the vanquishment of his early dreams disappeared.
And the memory of his love? Love is transient, but frozen lips and closed eyes can speak with a power unknown to the living, and the power abides to a longer day than the living voice had controlled. And so the night of his mourning was long, but the longest night has a dawn, and it seems to me that the saddest thing I can say in ending my tale is that the morning dawned and grief was forgotten. It is sad that we forget joys; it is sadder to forget sorrows.
And so this story of religion that called itself heavenly, and love that was most mortal, is over. Atmâ had had of earth's most beautiful things,
but no—Love and Religion are not left.
THE END.