The Dark Star

“Then why should anybody not believe it?”

“Try to believe it always. Particularly after your mother and I are no longer here, try to believe it… You are unusually intelligent; and if some day your intelligence discovers that it requires evidence for belief seek for that evidence. It is obtainable. Try to recognise it when you encounter it… Only, in any event, remember this: never alter your early faith, never destroy your childhood’s belief until evidence to prove the contrary convinces you.”

“No… There is no such evidence, is there, father?”

“I know of none.”

“Then,” said the girl calmly, “I shall take Christ’s evidence that I shall live again if I do no evil… Father?”

“Yes.”

“Is there any evidence that Adoniram has no soul?”

“I know of none.”

“Is there any that he has a soul?”

“Yes, I think there is.”

“Are you sure?”

“Not entirely.”

“I wonder,” mused the girl, looking gravely at the sleeping cat.

It was the first serious doubt that Ruhannah had ever entertained in her brief career.

That night she dreamed of the Yellow Devil in Herr Wilner’s box, and, awaking, remembered her dream. It seemed odd, too, because she had not even thought of the Yellow Devil for over a year.

But the menacing Mongol figure seemed bound to intrude into her life once more and demand her attention as though resentful of long oblivion and neglect; for, a week later, an old missionary from Indo-China – a native Chinese – who had lectured at the Baptist Church in Gayfield the evening previous, came to pay his respects to the Reverend Wilbour Carew. And Rue had taken the Yellow Devil from the olive-wood box that day and was busily making a pencil drawing of it.

At sight of the figure the native missionary’s narrow almond eyes opened extremely wide, and he leaned on the table and regarded the bronze demon very intently.

Then he took from his pocket and adjusted to his button nose a pair of large, horn spectacles; and he carefully examined the Chinese characters engraved on the base of the ancient bronze, following them slowly with a yellow and clawlike forefinger.

“Can you read what is written there?” inquired the Reverend Mr. Carew.

“Yes, brother. This is what is written: ‘I am Erlik, Ruler of Chaos and of All that Was. The old order passes when I arrive. I bring confusion among the peoples; I hurl down emperors; kingdoms crumble where I pass; the world begins to rock and tip, spilling nations into outer darkness. When there are no more kingdoms and no more kings; no more empires and no emperors; and when only the humble till, the blameless sow, the pure reap; and when only the teachers teach in the shadow of the Tree, and when the Thinker sits unstirring under the high stars, then, from the dark edges of the world I let go my grasp and drop into those immeasurable deeps from which I came – I, Erlik, Ruler of All that Was.’”

After a silence the Reverend Mr. Carew asked whether the figure was a very old one.

“It is before the period called ‘Han’ – a dynasty during which the Mongols were a mighty people. This inscription is Mongol. Erlik was the Yellow Devil of the Mongols.”

“Not a heathen god, then?”

“No, a heathen devil. Their Prince of Darkness.”

Ruhannah, pencil in hand, looked curiously at this heathen Prince of Darkness, arrived out of the dark ages to sit to her for his scowling portrait.

“I wonder what he thinks of America,” she said, partly to herself.

The native missionary smiled, picked up the Yellow Devil, shook the figure, listening.

“There is something inside,” he said; “perhaps jewels. If you drilled a hole in him you could find out.”

The Reverend Mr. Carew nodded absently:

“Yes; it might be worth while,” he said.

“If there is a jewel,” repeated the missionary, “you had better take it, then cast away the figure. Erlik brings disaster to the land where his image is set up.”

The Reverend Mr. Carew smiled at his Chinese and Christian confrère’s ineradicable vein of superstition.

CHAPTER IV

THE TRODDEN WAY

There came the indeterminate year when Ruhannah finished school and there was no money available to send her elsewhere for further embellishment, no farther horizon than the sky over the Gayfield hills, no other perspective than the main street of Gayfield with the knitting mill at the end of it.

So into Gayfield Mill the girl walked, and found a place immediately among the unskilled. And her career appeared to be predetermined now, and her destiny a simple one – to work, to share the toil and the gaieties of Gayfield with the majority of the other girls she knew; to marry, ultimately, some boy, some clerk in one of the Gayfield stores, some farmer lad, perhaps, possibly a school teacher or a local lawyer or physician, or possibly the head of some department in the mill, or maybe a minister – she was sufficiently well bred and educated for any one of these.

The winter of her seventeenth year found her still very much a child at heart, physically backward, a late adolescent, a little shy, inclined to silences, romantic, sensitive to all beauty, and passionately expressing herself only when curled up by the stove with her pencil and the red light of the coals falling athwart the slim hand that guided it.

She went sometimes to village parties, learned very easily to dance, had no preferences among the youths of Gayfield, no romances. For that matter, while she was liked and even furtively admired, her slight shyness, reticence, and a vague, indefinite something about her seemed to discourage familiar rustic gallantry. Also, she was as thin and awkward as an overgrown lad, not thought to be pretty, known to be poor. But for all that more than one young man was vaguely haunted at intervals by some memory of her grey eyes and the peculiar sweetness of her mouth, forgetting for the moment several freckles on the delicate bridge of her nose and several more on her sun-tanned cheeks.

She had an agreeable time that winter, enchanted to learn dancing, happy at “showers” and parties, at sleigh rides and “chicken suppers,” and the various species of village gaiety which ranged from moving pictures every Thursday and Saturday nights to church entertainments, amateur theatricals at the town hall, and lectures under the auspices of the aristocratic D. O. F. – Daughters of the Old Frontier.

But she never saw any boy she preferred to any other, never was conscious of being preferred, excepting once – and she was not quite certain about that.

It was old Dick Neeland’s son, Jim – vaguely understood to have been for several years in Paris studying art – and who now turned up in Gayfield during Christmas week.

Ruhannah remembered seeing him on several occasions when she was a little child. He was usually tramping across country with his sturdy father, Dick Neeland of Neeland’s Mills – an odd, picturesque pair with their setter dogs and burnished guns, and old Dick’s face as red as a wrinkled winter apple, and his hair snow-white.

There was six years’ difference between their ages, Jim Neeland’s and hers, and she had always considered him a grown and formidable man in those days. But that winter, when somebody at the movies pointed him out to her, she was surprised to find him no older than the other youths she skated with and danced with.

Afterward, at a noisy village party, she saw him dancing with every girl in town, and the drop of Irish blood in this handsome, careless young fellow established him at once as a fascinating favourite.

Rue became quite tremulous over the prospect of dancing with him. Presently her turn came; she rose with a sudden odd loss of self-possession as he was presented, stood dumb, shy, unresponsive, suffered him to lead her out, became slowly conscious that he danced rather badly. But awe of him persisted even when he trod on her slender foot.

He brought her an ice afterward, and seated himself beside her.

“I’m a clumsy dancer,” he said. “How many times did I spike you?”

She flushed and would have found a pleasant word to reassure him, but discovered nothing to say, it being perfectly patent to them both that she had retired from the floor with a slight limp.

“I’m a steam roller,” he repeated carelessly. “But you dance very well, don’t you?”

“I have only learned to dance this winter.”