"I do not know," she said, "perhaps I have only taken a step in the path."The lustrous splendor of her brow grew dim, her eyes were veiled beneath slow-dropping lids; a simple movement which affected the prying guests and kept them silent.Monsieur Becker was the first to recover courage.
"Dear child," he said, "you are truth itself, and you are ever kind.Iwould ask of you to-night something other than the dainties of your tea-table.If we may believe certain persons, you know amazing things;if this be true, would it not be charitable in you to solve a few of our doubts?""Ah!" she said smiling, "I walk on the clouds.I visit the depths of the fiord; the sea is my steed and I bridle it; I know where the singing flower grows, and the talking light descends, and fragrant colors shine! I wear the seal of Solomon; I am a fairy; I cast my orders to the wind which, like an abject slave, fulfils them; my eyes can pierce the earth and behold its treasures; for lo! am I not the virgin to whom the pearls dart from their ocean depths and--""--who led me safely to the summit of the Falberg?" said Minna, interrupting her.
"Thou! thou too!" exclaimed the strange being, with a luminous glance at the young girl which filled her soul with trouble."Had I not the faculty of reading through your foreheads the desires which have brought you here, should I be what you think I am?" she said, encircling all three with her controlling glance, to David's great satisfaction.The old man rubbed his hands with pleasure as he left the room.
"Ah!" she resumed after a pause, "you have come, all of you, with the curiosity of children.You, my poor Monsieur Becker, have asked yourself how it was possible that a girl of seventeen should know even a single one of those secrets which men of science seek with their noses to the earth,--instead of raising their eyes to heaven.Were Ito tell you how and at what point the plant merges into the animal you would begin to doubt your doubts.You have plotted to question me; you will admit that?""Yes, dear Seraphita," answered Wilfrid; "but the desire is a natural one to men, is it not?""You will bore this dear child with such topics," she said, passing her hand lightly over Minna's hair with a caressing gesture.
The young girl raised her eyes and seemed as though she longed to lose herself in him.
"Speech is the endowment of us all," resumed the mysterious creature, gravely."Woe to him who keeps silence, even in a desert, believing that no one hears him; all voices speak and all ears listen here below.Speech moves the universe.Monsieur Becker, I desire to say nothing unnecessarily.I know the difficulties that beset your mind;would you not think it a miracle if I were now to lay bare the past history of your consciousness? Well, the miracle shall be accomplished.You have never admitted to yourself the full extent of your doubts.I alone, immovable in my faith, I can show it to you; Ican terrify you with yourself.
"You stand on the darkest side of Doubt.You do not believe in God,--although you know it not,--and all things here below are secondary to him who rejects the first principle of things.Let us leave aside the fruitless discussions of false philosophy.The spiritualist generations made as many and as vain efforts to deny Matter as the materialist generations have made to deny Spirit.Why such discussions? Does not man himself offer irrefragable proof of both systems? Do we not find in him material things and spiritual things?
None but a madman can refuse to see in the human body a fragment of Matter; your natural sciences, when they decompose it, find little difference between its elements and those of other animals.On the other hand, the idea produced in man by the comparison of many objects has never seemed to any one to belong to the domain of Matter.As to this, I offer no opinion.I am now concerned with your doubts, not with my certainties.To you, as to the majority of thinkers, the relations between things, the reality of which is proved to you by your sensations and which you possess the faculty to discover, do not seem Material.The Natural universe of things and beings ends, in man, with the Spiritual universe of similarities or differences which he perceives among the innumerable forms of Nature,--relations so multiplied as to seem infinite; for if, up to the present time, no one has been able to enumerate the separate terrestrial creations, who can reckon their correlations? Is not the fraction which you know, in relation to their totality, what a single number is to infinity? Here, then, you fall into a perception of the infinite which undoubtedly obliges you to conceive of a purely Spiritual world.
"Thus man himself offers sufficient proof of the two orders,--Matter and Spirit.In him culminates a visible finite universe; in him begins a universe invisible and infinite,--two worlds unknown to each other.
Have the pebbles of the fiord a perception of their combined being?
have they a consciousness of the colors they present to the eye of man? do they hear the music of the waves that lap them? Let us therefore spring over and not attempt to sound the abysmal depths presented to our minds in the union of a Material universe and a Spiritual universe,--a creation visible, ponderable, tangible, terminating in a creation invisible, imponderable, intangible;completely dissimilar, separated by the void, yet united by indisputable bonds and meeting in a being who derives equally from the one and from the other! Let us mingle in one world these two worlds, absolutely irreconcilable to your philosophies, but conjoined by fact.
