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"Do I love her? only as the means to my end! The end once gained, I shall hate her as I do him. But not yet, and therefore must I love him as well as her. They shall be, to-day, my beloved children! To-morrow, how shall I endure till to-morrow, all the night through? O Gnulemah!
"Gnulemah, if not your daughter, might, however, have stood you in place of one; and she would have done you just as much good, in the way of softening and elevating your nature, as though she had been the issue of your own loins. You have turned the milk and honey of your life into gall and wormwood; and I wish I could feel sure that only you would get the benefit of it!"
"I hear you, Balder," said Gnulemah at length, tremulously, while her blank eyes rested on his face, "but I cannot see you. My lamp must have gone out. Will not you light it for me?" Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord: I will repay! The storm-cloud moved eastward and was dispersed.
Gnulemah had risen from her altar and was looking at Balder: he felt her glance, but though he told himself that he had done but justice, he dared not meet it! He kept his eyes fastened on the pallid countenance of the Egyptian. The latter's breath came feebly and irregularly, but the anxious expression was gone, and there was again the flickering smile.
"I haven't done such a thing since I was a child not much taller than a dandelion," returned Balder. He was not ethereal enough to follow Gnulemah in her apparently fanciful flight, else might he have lighted on a discovery to which all the good sense and logic in the world would not have brought him.
They seated themselves not on the bench, but on the yet more primitive grass beside it. They had not spoken as yet. Balder plucked some dandelions, and proceeded to twist them into a chain; and Gnulemah, after watching him for a while followed his example. "You and I have sat on the grass and woven such chains before," asserted she at length. "When was it?"
The Arcadian fashion in which the lovers' passion had ripened must soon change forever. It was perilous to advance, but to retreat was impossible. Balder was at bay; had he loved Gnulemah less, he would have regretted Charon's ferry-boat. But his love was greater for the danger and difficulty wherewith it was fraught. He could not summon the millennium; well, he might improve himself.
But that man shall not die without hearing the truth," he added, sternly. Again there was a dazzling lightning-flash, and the thunder seemed to break at their very ears. By a quick, sinuous movement, Gnulemah freed herself from his arm and looked at him with her grand eyes, night-black, lit each with a sparkling star.
Gnulemah was the arch-wonder; yet she so fully justified herself as to seem very nature; and by dint of her magic reality, what else had been wonderful seemed natural. Balder was in fairy-land. He fell easily into the fairy-land humor. "I am a being like yourself," said he, with a smile; "and not dumb like your plants and animals." "Understood! answered!" exclaimed Gnulemah again, in a tremor.
So to Gnulemah the cliff and the garden wall were her limits of real existence. The great picture outside could be true for her only after she had gone forth and felt as well as seen it. Fancy aside, however, was not hers a condition morally and mentally deplorable? Exquisitely developed in body, must not her mind have grown rank with weeds, beautiful perhaps, but poisonous?
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