Chapter VIII: Red Light

Walls of rock crashed beside Regan; he fell into a chasm where before his eyes flowed volcanoes’ fire.

The air was sulphurous. The sea swept upon him through the cleft rocks.

Even he was appalled! Alone! Both dead!—Isabella and the man who would not marry her, who would not love her, his beautiful sister Isabella!

For Regan did not know that they were saved. He had no time to see what had happened.

“But still I live,” he cried, “and we shall reach the planet sun of Jupiter after a time! I will take courage! It is only a custom of man to expect companionship! One can exist just as well without it! No human voice! No human love! No kiss! No help! No words! I will go on alone! I can go on alone!”

Then for awhile he was silent, looking about him. After a time he said:

“It will not do; there is no one to cheat save myself and my own soul! Shall I try to lie to it? Oh! tortured soul! If I only could believe!”

Regan cast himself beside the molten flood, waiting his doom.

“Rondah! Rondah! I shall never see you!” he moaned. “Did you die in the snow? Where are you? From what place do you see me? Oh! my love, my love!”

The air grew sulphurous with smoke. The rocks fell between him and the sea, and others fell between him and the lava.

He was too lethargic to look. The habit of the globe had seized upon him! He fell asleep for years! For people are a part of that globe which they inhabit. They do not realize it, but they breathe, move, think, exist, according to its spirit, as a portion of it!

If world still call to world, as they did when the morning stars sang together, the voices are of different attunement, but they blend in one grand chord of harmony.

Jupiter marched on, attended by his satellites.

A little light fell upon the white ball; far off, the sun, as a day-star, gave a grayness to the darkness.

The winds were dead. They did not move the smoke above the craters. Asleep with the stars, asleep was Regan!

On, on came that burning planet, which has yet to cool from lava seas to the crust of continents, yet to jar and burst, and flame with deluges of the first ocean’s fall, yet to pass through all the cataclysms of universal epoch, before there shall be upon its surface one pulpy, spongy thing that has the lowest form of life!

As one leaf among ten million has Nature’s time to fall, so in Nature shall come the time for a globe to bloom, among myriads, as unnoticeable in the multitude sweeping before the vision of the Lord as is the one leaf on the tree!

Time shall come when it shall add a world’s souls to the kingdom of the Redeemer!

When the small sun and red Jupiter shone at once upon the star it made strange daylight. The great planet sent red, burning beams ahead. Brilliant scarlet was his day.

What spirit would fall across space from such a fiery mass of convulsion as Jupiter? Nothing quieting, nothing holy, nothing merciful! A red light—only a red light!

Upon one spot in the star the cold touched not, the snow did not fall. The Sun Island, as the bird men named it, was as calm as Paradise through all these years!

Like a piece of the sun it slept in snow. What was beyond its blazing walls no one knew.

From this white brilliancy, when Jupiter had brought daylight, came forth Father Renaudin. Across the waste of snow he walked serenely, an unearthly rapture upon his face. Storms could not ruffle his crimson robe, nor was he touched by the chill breath of the wind which had wakened for Jupiter.

“By and by,” he was saying, “I shall know all. I shall have passed beyond the reach of forgetfulness. I shall be troubled by no such paltry remnant as earthly remembrance. Somewhere and sometime I shall be freed from the clogs of this non-understandable machine, the human brain! This atom, borne apart from all the isles in the ocean of immensity, shall come one cycle nearer to the æon’s goal, the end of time!”

Father Renaudin was not dismayed at the approach of the star to the great planet. The crash of worlds could not shake the faith of a man come from the Sun Island!

And the days of Jupiter became more brilliant than ever with red light.