"Your holiness," said the captain of the sacred guard, as he entered the apartment, "the twin-soul Ardsolus and Merga has sinned against the laws and religion of Egyplosis. I crave permission to bring the guilty pair before the goddess with the evidence of their guilt."
The goddess, answering quickly, ordered the priest and priestess to be produced.
The captain thereupon commanded his wayleals to bring the prisoners into the audience chamber.
Shrinking between her guards, the priestess Merga appeared bearing in her arms a lovely babe, a rosy duplicate of herself. Following her came the priest Ardsolus, also a prisoner.
The priestess was the picture of petite girlish beauty. Her delicate rose complexion was flushed with a feeling of shame, and her handsome hazel eyes, dilated with vexation and sorrow, were filled with tears.
Her lover was tall, straight and athletic, with a proud, fine-cut face. The down of manhood was just showing itself on his upper lip.
"I feel sorry for you both," said the goddess; "did you weary of the joys of Egyplosis?"
Ardsolus threw back over his shoulder a falling fold of his white bournous and, drawing himself proudly up, replied: "Yes, your holiness, our life here is imprisonment. We have grown weary of its restraint and are eager to return to the outer world with all its cares and freedom."
The chamberlain at this moment announced the arrival of the high priest Hushnoly, the secular, as well as the sacred governor of Egyplosis, and the high priestess Zooly-Soase, who both entered the presence chamber. Hushnoly, saluting the goddess, announced that he had come in search of the erring twin-soul. The high priest was astonished beyond expression at finding sin and shame in so glorious a retreat.
Addressing the weeping girl, he said: "Do you know, my child, how unfortunate you have been? You have committed the unpardonable sin in the temple of hopeless love. Did you not think of your lifelong vows of celibacy and of the deep and tender joy of romantic love?"
Merga only replied by clasping her babe still closer to her breast and bathing it with her tears.
"What excuse do you offer for your crime against yourself, your religion and your fellow-priests?" demanded the high, priest of Ardsolus.
"Your highness," said the youth, "we have, after due experience of our vows, arrived at the conclusion that such vows are a violation of nature. Everything here bids us love, but the artificial system under which we have lived arbitrarily draws a line and says, thus far and no further. Your system may suit disembodied spirits, if such exist, but not beings of flesh and blood. It is an outrage on nature. We desire to leave Egyplosis and return to the common ways of men. We may be there unfortunate, but we will be free. This rarified atmosphere stifles us."
The high priest was horrified. Never before had a twin-soul been so sinful, so contumacious. It revealed a state of things too terrible to contemplate! If such conduct became contagious, it meant the ruin of Egyplosis.
I could detect, however, in the sight of the goddess a certain sympathy for the prisoners which, perhaps, it would just then be very impolitic for her to reveal. It was clear that beneath all this ideal joy lay a slumbering volcano of passion that only awaited a favorable moment for a fierce outbreak. The laws of this strange faith seemed not to have contemplated that to avoid temptation is the only security of moral strength, and that to seek temptation is to paralyze the moral fibres of the soul. The high priest grew pale with excitement.
"Are you aware of the enormity of your offence?" said he to the defiant youth. "For a moment of sinful delight you destroy your interregnum of a hundred years of blessedness, and you, each of you, have delivered a blow at earthly immortality. The success of our religious system is proven by the fact that we have already lengthened the life of our hierophants one hundred years, or twice the duration of life in the outer world of Bilbimtesirol. This is the last of many outbreaks of _malfeasance_ to vows made in deliberation, and a fresh exhibition of treason in the sacred college of souls."
"I tell you this," said the youth in reply, "you are slumbering on the edge of a volcano. There are thousands of twin-souls ready to cast off this yoke. They only await a leader to break out in open revolt!"
"Then, sir, we will take care that you are not their leader; we shall suppress you, as we have all similar cases, in the cells of the fortress. Neither Egyplosis nor Atvatabar will hear of your crime. His majesty the king will, I have no doubt, acquiesce in the wisdom of such sentence."
"The punishment is no greater than the crime," said the high priestess. "I despair of Egyplosis if such crimes become frequent.
What will our goddess think, what will Atvatabar think of our holy temple when its own priests, the sacred devotees of Harikar, the ministers of the supreme goddess and teachers of the people in their holy religion, are found traitors? Will the government support rebellious and sinful souls in every luxury for the senses, with every possible means for developing and achieving spiritual mastery over the physical world, on the sole condition of hopeless love? It will not.
Hence, I say, this disobedience must be quenched in the spark, or it will break out in ruin to our whole religious institution."
"Your punishment," said the high priest, "unless you will repent of your misdeed, give up possession of your offspring, and live ever afterward as holy priests of hopeless love, will be separate and solitary confinement for life in the fortress. You will both be simply obliterated from the world."
As the high priest uttered these words the mother-priestess gave a cry of terror, and, grasping her infant convulsively, gazed with an appealing glance at the goddess.
"We refuse to live as hypocrites," said the youth; "we are no longer twin-souls--we are man and wife and demand to be set free."
"Will you, each of you," said the goddess, "renounce that obedience that makes you factors of deities? Will you dethrone ideal love? Will you throw away palaces and gardens and flowers? Will you forswear the delight of the companionship of twin-souls?"
"We wish to be set free, your holiness," said the youth with firm, set lips.
"Do you no longer value the secrets of magic and sorcery? Do you renounce initiation into the secrets of nature to possess creative force to taste the elixir of life, the secret of the transformation of metals, and, above all, the blessedness of Nirvana? Knowing that love dies in possession do you desire to step forth from paradise into a hard, cold, realistic world, where every experience is a spear driven into the flesh?"
"We dare our fate!" replied the youth. "We ask you, goddess, to set us free."
"I will bring you both before the spiritual council," said Hushnoly, "and, as you are aware, the sentence of the council as provided by the constitution of Egyplosis will be that you, each of you, be imprisoned in separate cells for life, and the child removed and cared for in a distant part of the kingdom. You will henceforth be obliterated from life."
The lovers convulsively embraced each other, the beautiful Merga weeping bitterly.
"We will accept the punishment," said Ardsolus, "because we will give courage to the many twin-souls already imprisoned and also to those who as ardently desire freedom as ourselves. They will never forget that we are fighting their battle against a monstrous wrong."
"Guards, remove the prisoners," said the high priest.
"Can nothing that I may say mitigate their punishment?" said the goddess.
"Your holiness is aware," said Hushnoly, "that the laws of Egyplosis admit of no other interpretation than that prescribed for such a case as this. The foundation of the religion of Atvatabar must be preserved at any cost."
"I urge for mercy," said the goddess, who honored the prisoners with her tears.
CHAPTER XXXIII.
THE DOCTOR'S OPINION OF EGYPLOSIS.
My experiences in Egyplosis were teaching me that even the most perfect human organizations contain the elements of decay and death.
The human soul at variance with its own physical condition was hardly the best ideal of a god. Here was happiness piled upon happiness, yet the recipients thereof were not happy. Disappointments and suffering are natural to man because life is supported on difficulty, and a long-continued happiness is the sure forerunner of disaster. The reaction of misery lies somewhere concealed from the eye of happiness, and if it does not at once show itself, it will later on. Even in well-guarded happiness, if one single pleasure be omitted, we experience more regret at its absence than pleasure over the bounties we enjoy. Hence, a large proportion of twin-souls were not wholly in love with their life in the temple of souls, however enamored they were of each other. Almost absolute freedom of action, freedom from care, physical and mental exercises, soul development, the practice of magic, the most alluring investigation of mental and spiritual themes, the study and practice of art in all its forms, and the investigation of inventive mechanism; a palace to live in, with vast galleries of paintings and sculptures, salons for music, and schools of science, libraries filled with the rarest works of history, literature and poetry, and, most precious of all, the daily dalliance with counterpart souls, could not make these people happy. The one thing denied, which any reasonable man would say was simply the price paid for all this glory, was considered the greatest of all misfortunes.
The imagination has a strange habit of passing lightly over happiness possessed and settling down upon a little thing beyond reach and exaggerating it to the utmost.
The imprisonment of Ardsolus and Merga created a profound sensation among the ten thousand inmates of the palace. Sentiment was divided so much that two political parties were formed--those who believed the erring lovers had met a just fate, and those who thought the system at fault in providing no means of immediate escape, when to reside in the palace became imprisonment and a living death to certain souls. The latter party was composed of the more youthful section of the priesthood, who sympathized with the unfortunate lovers. These latter would have got up a demonstration in their favor did not the stern rules of Egyplosis suppress any such outbursts of popular feeling.
On the day following the imprisonment of the erring twin-soul, the question was being discussed in the apartments occupied by the officers of the _Polar King_ and myself. We had been lodged in a noble building not far from the palace of the goddess, while the sailors were quartered in the fortress of Egyplosis, in company with the wayleals of the palace itself.
"Your opinion of Egyplosis has possibly undergone a change since the day of our reception," said the doctor.
"Well," said I, "I suppose the longer we stay here the more exact will be our knowledge of this peculiar institution."
I had considered Egyplosis as a successful institution for developing the human soul. Certainly Harikar with his beloved attributes required a fit home for his complete development.
I had praised their oasis of love, of refinement, of rest, and of beauty, and even ventured to assert that such a paradise was the outcome of the love and purity of twin-souls. I forgot in my enthusiasm the possibility of the soul being satiated with pleasure, that life is a warfare ever seeking but never gaining repose, and that we are led more by our passions and illusions than our judgment. I forgot that while man resists pain he always yields to pleasure. I forgot that he was created for difficulty, which is the oxygen that feeds the flame of endeavor, and that difficulty alone can develop efforts which pleasure so easily destroys.
"I am of the opinion," said the doctor, "that this institution is founded on a perversion of human nature. This so-called hopeless love is, as we have just had proof, one of the most disturbing elements in life. Its victims resemble Tantalus, who, though steeped to the lips in water, can never drink. They are the unhappy devotees of an idol, and, like the Hindoos, stick into their sides the hooks of a cruel passion and swing aloft in torture to the applause of an admiring crowd."
"You evidently do not reverence hopeless love?" I remarked.
"I consider Egyplosis," he continued, "but a nervous asylum on a large scale. This nervous temperament, with its hysterical raptures and tears, its painful sensibility, its exalted spiritualism and irresistible sympathy, departs so far from the steady temperate sphere of action that can alone sustain alike the pleasures and disappointments of life as to become the object of pity. These are the marks of a mental disease. Ultra-romantic ideas and whimsical and unaccountable tastes are attributes of this temperament. It is a kind of insanity, not the insanity proceeding from hopeless mental aberration, but founded on a systematic train of ideas born in a heated enthusiasm. It may lead, however, to hopeless insanity."