Read Ebook: Dreams and delights by Beck L Adams Lily Adams

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 1459 lines and 83830 words, and 30 pages

The longing grew inarticulate and stronger, like the dumb yearning instincts which move the world of unspeaking creatures. It seemed to her that she sent her soul through the night pleading, pleading. Then very slowly she relaxed into sleep as she lay in the moonlight--deep, soul-satisfying sleep. And so dreamed.

She stood in the Shalimar Garden of the dead Mogul Empresses in Kashmir. How well she knew it, how passionately she loved it! She and Sidney Verrier had moored their houseboat on the Dal Lake not far away one happy summer and had wandered almost daily to the Shalimar, glorying in the beauty of its fountains and rushing cascades, and the roses--roses everywhere in a most bewildering sweetness. How often she had gone up the long garden ways to the foot of the hills that rise into mountains and catch the snows and stars upon their heights. It was no wonder she should dream of it. So in her dream she walked up to the great pavilion supported on noble pillars of black marble from Pampoor, and the moon swam in a wavering circle in the water before it, and she held back a moment to see it break into a thousand reflections, and then became aware of a man leaning with folded arms by the steps: his face clear in the moonlight.

Instantly she knew him, as he did her--the man of her dream of the Temple of Govindhar.

As before he turned and came toward her.

"I have waited for you by the temple and here and in many other places. I wait every night. How is it you come so seldom?" he said. His voice was stronger, his bearing more alert and eager than at Govindhar. He spoke with a kind of assurance of welcome which she responded to instantly.

"I would have come. I didn't know. How can I tell?"

He looked at her smiling.

"There is only one way. Why didn't you learn it in India? It was all round you and you didn't even notice. You don't know your powers. Listen."

Beatrice Veronica drew towards him, eyes rapt on his face, scarcely breathing. Yes--in India she had felt there were mighty stirrings about her, thrills of an unknown spiritual life, crisping the surface like a breeze, and passing--passing before ever you could say it was there. But it did not touch her with so much as an outermost ripple. She was too ignorant. Now--she could learn.

"You see--this is the way of it," he said, leaning against the black pillar. "The soul is sheer thought and knowledge, but, prisoned in the body, it is the slave of the senses and all its powers are limited by these. And they lead it into acts which in their consequences are fetters of iron. Still, at a certain point of attainment one can be freer than most men believe possible. When this is so, you use the Eight Means of Mental Concentration and are free. You step into a new dimension."

She stammered, and could not finish.

"I know. Someone you want to find in the dark. Well, it can be done. You would not believe the possibilities of that freed state of consciousness. Here, in the Shalimar you think you see nothing but moonlight and water--nothing in fact but what your senses tell you. But that is nonsense. Your eyes are shut. You are asleep in Canada and yet you see them by the inner light of memory even now and the help I am giving you! Well--use the Eight Means, and you will see them waking and as clearly as you do in sleep. But I, who am instructed, see more. This garden to me is peopled with those who made it--the dead kings and queens who rejoiced in its beauty. See--" he laid his hand on hers and suddenly she saw. Amazing--amazing! They were alone no longer.

Sitting on the floor of the pavilion, looking down into the moon-mirroring water was a woman in the ancient dress of Persia, golden and jewelled,--she flung her head up magnificently as if at the words, and looked at them, the moon full in her eyes. The garden was peopled now not only with roses but white blossoms sending out fierce hot shafts of perfume. They struck Beatrice Veronica like something tangible, and half dazed her as she stared at the startling beauty of the unveiled woman revealed like a flaming jewel in the black and white glory of the night.

With his hand on hers, she knew without words. Nourmahal the Empress, ruler of the Emperor who made the Shalimar for her pleasure, who put India with all its glories at her feet. Who else should be the soul of the garden?

But as she watched spellbound, the man lifted his hand from hers and the garden was empty of all but moonlight and roses once more, and he and she alone. She could have wept for utter loss.

"Was it a ghost?" she asked trembling.

"No, no,--an essential something that remains in certain places, not a ghost. There is nothing of what you mean by that word. Don't be frightened! You'll often see them."

She stared at him perplexed, and he added:

She was stunned, dazed by the revelations. They meant so much more that it is possible to record. Also the sensation was beginning in her which we all know before waking. The dream wavers on its foundation, loosens, becomes misty, makes ready to disappear. It would be gone--gone before she could know. She caught his hand as if to steady it.

His face was receding, palpitating, collapsing, but his voice came as if from something beyond it.

"That is what you call me. Names are nothing. Yes, come every night."

It was gone. She was in the Shalimar alone, and somewhere in the distance she heard Sidney Verrier's voice calling clear as a bird. Beatrice Veronica woke that morning with the sun glorying through the eastern arch of her veranda. She was still dressed. She had slept there all night. Of the dream she remembered snatches, hints, which left new hopes and impulses germinating in her soul. The unknown flowers were sown in spring. They would blossom in summer in unimaginable beauty.

That was the beginning of a time of strange and enchanting happiness. Thus one may imagine the joy of a man born blind who by some miraculous means is made to see, and wakes in a world of wonders. It is impossible that anyone should know greater bliss. The very weight of it made her methodical and practical lest a grain of heavenly gold should escape her in its transmutation to earthly terms.

And at night there was now invariably the meeting. At first that was always in some place she knew--somewhere she recognized from memory, haunts of her own with Sidney Verrier. But one night a new thing happened--she woke into dream by the Ganges at Cawnpore, at the terrible Massacre Ghaut, a place she had always avoided because of the horrible memories of the Indian mutiny which sicken the soul of every European who stands there.

Now she stood at the top of the beautiful broken steps under the dense shade of the very trees where the mutineers ambushed, and he was below, beckoning her.

"Well done, well done!" he said, as she came slowly down to where holy Ganges lips the lowest step. "This was a great experiment. You could never have come here alone,--I could not have brought you until now, and I had to fight the repugnance in you, but here you are. You see? We have been putting stepping-stones, you and I, each from our own side, and now the bridge is made and we hold hands in the middle. You can come anywhere now. And listen--I too am learning to go where I have never been. The world will be open to us soon."

He looked at her with glowing eyes--the eyes of the explorer, the discoverer, on the edge of triumph.

"But why here--in this horrible place?" She shrank a little even from him as she looked about her. He laughed:

"That is no more now than a last year's winter storm. They know. They were not afraid even then. They laugh now as they go on their way. Be happy, beloved. They are beyond the mysteries."

"I'm only a pioneer," he said to Beatrice Veronica one day sitting in the gardens of the Taj. "You too. It will be done much better soon. See how we are out-growing our limitations and feeling out after the wonders of the sub-conscious self, the essential that hands on the torch when we die. Die? No, I hate that word. Let's say, climb a step higher on the ladder of existence. Every inch gives us a wider view of the country. You see?"

"Do you know I write for you?" she ventured to ask. "I have often wondered if you speak as unconsciously as I write."

"Do you think I want to?" she asked.

But what was to be the solvent? That, this story can only indicate faintly for the end is not yet.

She went out a little less into her small world of daily life--not shunning it certainly, but her inner life was so crowded, so blissful that the outer seemed insipid enough. Why figure at teas and bridge parties, and struggle with the boredom of mah jong when the veranda was waiting with the green way before it that led to the silence of the sea, and the lover beyond? For it had come to that--the lover. All joy summed up in that word, joy unmeasurable as the oceans of sunlight--a perfect union. She walked as one carefully bearing a brimmed cup,--not a drop, not a drop must spill,--so she carried herself a little stiffly as it might seem to the outer world which could not guess the reason.

People liked her--but she moved on her own orbit, and it only intersected theirs at certain well-defined points. Her soft abstracted air won but eluded;--it put an atmosphere of strangeness about her, of thoughts she could not share with anyone.

"She must have rather a lonely life of it!" they said. But she never had.

She laid down the letter there and looked at the beloved pines almost glittering in the sunshine as it slid off their smooth needles. And idle?--her life, her wonderful secret life! Little indeed did Sidney know if she could write like that. She took up the letter again, smiling.

There was more, but that is the essential. You may think at this point that you know exactly how this story must inevitably end. But no.

It was about four months after this that Beatrice Veronica was rung up on the telephone in her veranda as she sat reading. The imperative interruption annoyed her;--she put down her book. A man's voice.

"Miss Leslie? I think your friend Mrs. Mourilyan told you I was coming to Victoria. My name is Welland."

Polite assurances from the veranda.

"Yes, I am staying at the Empress. May I come out and see you this afternoon? I have a small parcel for you from Mrs. Mourilyan."

So it was settled, and with her Chinese servant she made the little black oak table beautiful with silver and long-stemmed flowers in beautiful old English glass bowls. If he went back to Yercaud he should at least tell Sidney that her home in "that cold country" was desirable.

He came at four and she could hear his voice in the little hall as Wing admitted him.

She liked it. The words were clear, well-cut, neither blurred nor bungled. Then he came in. A tall man, broad-shouldered, with grey eyes and hair that sprang strongly from a broad forehead, clean-shaven, a sensitive mouth, possibly thirty-eight, or so. All these things flashed together in an impression of something to be liked and trusted. On his side he saw a young woman in a blue-grey gown with hazel eyes and hair to match--a harmony of delicate browns enhancing an almond-pale face with faintly coloured lips and a look of fragility which belied the nervous strength beneath.

The parcel was given and received; a chain of Indian moonstones in silver, very lovely in its shifting lights, and then came news, much news, of the home at Yercaud.

"I heard of you so much there that you are no stranger to me," he said, watching with curious interest while she filled the Chinese cups of pink and jade porcelain with jasmine tea from a hidden valley in Anhui. It fascinated him--the white hands flitting like little quick birds on their quick errands, the girl, so calm and self-possessed, mistress of herself and her house. Many years of wandering had opened his heart to the feminine charm of it all, the quiet, the rose-leaf scent in the air, the things which group by instinct about a refined woman.

"You have a delightful home!" he said at last, rather abruptly.

"Yes-- When you return do try to convince Mrs. Mourilyan that I don't live in a hut on an iceberg. You agree with me, I am sure, that only Kashmir and perhaps one or two other places can be more beautiful than this."

"Yes. I fully agree. Yet it misses something which permeates India in places far less beautiful. It lacks atmosphere. Just as the fallen leaves of a forest make up a rich soil in which all growth is luxuriant, so the dead ancientry of India makes earth and air rich with memory and tradition--and more. You can't get it in these new countries."

"I know," she said eagerly. "Here it's just a beautiful child with all her complexities before her. It rests one, you know. I felt it an amazing rest when I came here."

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet