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Page 27
"I wonder whether he's really mad?" mused Balder Helwyse, shuddering a
little in the dampness.
"But, badinage aside," resumed this loquacious voice, "although there
is so much talk and dispute about evil, very few people know what evil
essentially is. Now, there are some things, the mere doing of which by
the most involuntary agent would at once stamp his soul with the
conviction of ineffable sin. He would have touched the essence of
evil. And if a wise man has done that, he has had in his hand the key
to omnipotence!"
"It is easily had, then. A man need but take his Leviticus and
Deuteronomy, and run through the catalogue of crimes. He would be sure
of finding the key hidden beneath some of them."
"No; you do Moses scant justice. He--shrewd soul!--was too cunning to
fall into such an error as that. He forbade a few insignificant and
harmless acts, which every one is liable to commit. His policy was no
less simple than sagacious. By amusing mankind with such trumpery, he
lured them off the scent of true sin. Believe me, the artifice was no
idle one. Should mankind learn the secret, a generation would not pass
before the world would be turned upside down, and its present Ruler
buried in the ruins!"
At this point, surely, Helwyse got up and went to his state-room
without listening to another word?--Not so. The Lucifer in him was
getting the better of the sage. He wanted to hear all that the voice
of darkness had to say. There might be something new, something
instructive in it. He might hear a word that would unbar the door he
had striven so long to open. He aimed at knowledge and power beyond
recognized human reach. He had taken thought with himself keenly and
deeply, but was still uncertain and unsatisfied. Here opened a new
avenue, so untried as to transcend common criticism. The temptation to
omnipotence is a grand thing, and may have shaken greater men than
Helwyse; and he had trained himself to regard it--not exactly as a
temptation. As for good or bad methods,--at a certain intellectual
height such distinctions vanish. Vulgar immorality he would turn from
as from anything vulgar; but refined, philosophic immorality, as a
weapon of power,--there was fascination in it.
--Folly and delusion!--
But Helwyse was only Helwyse, careering through pitchy darkness, on a
viewless sea, with a plausible voice at his ear insinuating villanous
thoughts with an air of devilish good-fellowship!
The "Empire State" was at this moment four and a half miles northeast
of the schooner whose bowsprit she was destined to carry away. The
steamer was making about ten knots an hour: the schooner was slowly
drifting with the tide into the line of the steamer's course. The
catastrophe was therefore about twenty-seven minutes distant.
IX.
THE VOICE OF DARKNESS.
The fog-whistle screeched dismally. Helwyse took his feet off the
camp-stool in front of him, and sat upright.
"Do you know this secret of sin?" he asked.
"It must, of course, be an object of speculation to a thoughtful man,"
answered the voice, modestly parrying the question. "But I assure you
that only a man of intellect--of genius--has in him the intelligence,
the sublime reach of soul, which could attain the full solution of the
problem; they who merely blunder into it would fail to grasp the grand
significance of the idea."
"But you affirm that whoever fairly masters the problem of absolute
sin would have God and His kingdom at his mercy?"
"I am loath to appear boastful; but I apprehend the fact to be not
unlike what you suggest," the voice replied, with a subdued gusto. "It
would depend upon our hypothetical person's discretion, and his views
as to the claims of the august Being who has so long controlled the
destinies of the human race, how much the existing order of things
might have to fear from him. I should imagine that the august Being,
if He be as wise as they say He is, would be careful how He treated
this hypothetical person!"
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