“In Heaven there is no variableness nor any shadow of turning, as you should well know who used to be so fond of preaching from that text.”
“Oh, my God!” said the good Bishop Odo, from force of habit: and the benevolence went out of his plump face.
For now contrition of the very sincerest sort had smitten him. He thought of his parishioners, of his misled lost flock, all decent, civilized, well-meaning communicants, entrapped, just by his over-fondness for rhetoric, into that fearful lair of multiheaded dragons and of all miscellaneous monstrosities. For these preposterous beasts, it seemed, were not mere figments of speech. There actually before him was one of the twelve pearls through which he had promised the flower of his little flock a glorious entry into Heaven: and the Book of the Revelation of St. John the Divine, in the teeth of all rational interpretation, was turning out to be something much worse than high-flown unintelligibility which you had to pretend to admire.
Inside that shining wall the hapless peasantry and the burghers whom his oratory had betrayed were now looked after by no benevolent bishop but were abandoned to the whims of unaccountable overlords, with hair like wool and with feet made of brass, who spent their time in blowing trumpets, and in opening vials full of plague germs, and in affixing sealing-wax to the foreheads of the defenceless dead. His little flock were now the appalled associates of huge locusts with human heads, and of wild horses with the tails of serpents, and of calves with eyes inset in their posterior parts. Nor were the perplexing customs and the patchwork animal-life of this barbaric bedlam atoned for by its climate, because every moment or two there was—so near as the Bishop could recall his sacred studies,—an earthquake or an uncommonly severe hailstorm: every moment or two the sun turned black, or the moon red, or else the stars came tumbling loose like fruit from a shaken fig tree; and seven thunders were intermittently conversing, for the most part about indelicate topics.
And Odo of Valneres, he also, who was so wholly dependent upon peaceful and refined surroundings, would presently be imprisoned in this awful place, for no real fault, but just through his well-meant endeavors to make life more orderly and more pleasant for his little flock. Already that infernal automatic cloud had moored itself.
10. OF HIS RIGHTEOUS ENDING
Inasmuch as there seemed to be no alternative, the Bishop and the witch-woman disembarked, perforce, upon the bright wharf of Heaven. Now behind and below unhappy Odo of Valneres was only an endless gray abyss; beneath him showed great gleaming slabs like yellowish and bluish glass; and before him loomed inexorably the gate carved out of a giant pearl.
“Come, come!” a somewhat desperate prelate cried aloud, “but even now there must be some way of escape from that existence which I used to promise, in the days of my rash disbelief, as a reward?”
“There is,” Ettarre replied to him, very proudly and happily; “for against love nothing can prevail. Why, but do you not understand! I am permitted to tempt you. Upon a cloud, of course, one feels a trifle insecure. But here we touch firm jasper and lapis lazuli. And now, with such allurements as you have not yet, I do believe, my wonderful enormous darling, quite utterly forgotten the way of, now I am going to preserve you from all sorts of celestial horrors.”
“Eh, and is it possible, even at the last, for the welldoer to evade his doom? Is there some other and more suitable place yet open, upon post-mortem repentance, to a well-thought-of bishop?”
The dear child said then, still with that very touching fondness of which he felt himself to be unworthy:
“At the cost of just one tiny pleasant indiscretion, even now, my own sweetheart, you will be refused admittance. You can then return with me to the more urbane and rationally conducted Paradise of the Pagans. And that is nothing like your so horrible and gaudy Kingdom of Heaven, but instead, it is a democracy which lacks for no modern improvements in the way of culture and of civilization.”
Thereupon Ettarre began to speak as to her present abode in somewhat the opulent vein of an exceedingly young poet. And the good Bishop Odo, looking upon her with the old fondness, and with unforgotten delight in her dear loveliness, was aware of that in the large and curiously glittering eyes of Ettarre which, he was certain, nobody in that dreadful Oriental phantasmagoria just ahead could ever understand with quite that sympathy which moved in him rebelliously.
Ettarre, no doubt, was overcoloring some of her details. One exaggerated, for art’s sake, in these descriptory passages. And he very well remembered how the little darling, when she was pretending to be a saint, had lied to him night after night with the unction of a funeral sermon. Even so, this adorable and cuddling witch-woman was a person whom Odo of Valneres, in his far-off pious youth, when he believed in saints, had cherished with a fervor and with a variousness not ever utterly to be put out of mind. And for the rest, the Bishop might, he felt just now—with all the sedative dilapidations of age thus marvelously repaired,—be happy enough, perhaps, in rewarding the warm loyalty of his Ettarre, among those cultured and broad-minded and intelligent circles which she described.
There remained only to allow for that slight girlish habit of unveracity.
Thus pensively did the Bishop begin to appraise the probabilities, in the while that from force of habit he made the sign of the cross, as he waited there, withholding his dark kindly eyes for a moment from the strangely large and glittering eyes of Ettarre, and looking downward, all through that rather lengthy moment in which he half paternally caressed the soft and the so lovely little hand of the dear love of his far-off, pious, hot-blooded youth; and she cuddled closer and yet closer to him and wriggled very deliciously in her candid and quite flattering affection.
At just this amiable season, the serenity of their reunion was overcast by the arrival of yet another cloud. It moored: and a child disembarked, a boy of seven or thereabouts, but newly dead and come alone through the gray void between Earth and Heaven. This little ghost passed by them as the child went uncertainly but meekly into the Holy City. The narrow shoulders were a trifle huddled, for these slabs of jasper and of lapis lazuli seemed more chilly to the small bare feet than had been the brown carpet of the child’s nursery, and the soft arms of that mother whom he had left far behind him.
Now also Odo of Valneres had raised his very generally admired eyes from the neighborhood of his red flannel footwarrners, toward that huge and dazzling perforated pearl.
“I was thinking,” he observed, with somewhat more of gentleness than of any plain connection, “that I rather, as they put it, get on with children. My people are so flattering as to say I have a way with them. I could, I really do believe, have cheered that forlorn little fellow tremendously with one of my simpler Confirmation addresses, if we had travelled through that abyss together. In fact, a clergyman of real talents, and of my rather varied experience, could probably cheer up any other saved soul in Heaven, in view of what must be the local average of cheerfulness—”
“No doubt you could, my wonderful, kind-hearted, clever darling,” Ettarre replied. “But now that fearful place, my precious, is a place with which you have no further need to be bothering.”
Odo of Valneres, however, was smiling with something of the enthusiast’s fervor. Then, for one instant only, he again looked downward, with the air of a man as yet perplexed and irresolute, and again he crossed himself, and he drew a deep breath which seemed to inform him through and through with unpersuadable determination.
Gently he put aside the love of his youth: and, with that frank fine air of manliness which had always graced his professional utterances, he spoke.