Lilith by George MacDonald (ebook reader below 3000 .TXT) 📕

I too have repented, and am blessed.⁠—Thou, Lilith, hast not yet repented; but thou must.⁠—Tell me, is the great Shadow beautiful? Knowest thou how long thou wilt thyself remain beautiful?⁠—Answer me, if thou knowest.”

Then at last I understood that Mr. Raven was indeed Adam, the old and the new man; and that his wife, ministering in the house of the dead, was Eve, the mother of us all, the lady of the New Jerusalem.

The leopardess reared; the flickering and fleeing of her spots began; the princess at length stood radiant in her perfect shape.

“I am beautiful⁠—and immortal!” she said⁠—and she looked the goddess she would be.

“As a bush that burns, and is consumed,” answered he who had been her husband. “⁠—What is that under thy right hand?”

For her arm lay across her bosom, and her hand was pressed to her side.

A swift pang contorted her beautiful face, and passed.

“It is but a leopard-spot that lingers! it will quickly follow those I have dismissed,” she answered.

“Thou art beautiful because God created thee, but thou art the slave of sin: take thy hand from thy side.”

Her hand sank away, and as it dropt she looked him in the eyes with a quailing fierceness that had in it no surrender.

He gazed a moment at the spot.

“It is not on the leopard; it is in the woman!” he said. “Nor will it leave thee until it hath eaten to thy heart, and thy beauty hath flowed from thee through the open wound!”

She gave a glance downward, and shivered.

“Lilith,” said Adam, and his tone had changed to a tender beseeching, “hear me, and repent, and He who made thee will cleanse thee!”

Her hand returned quivering to her side. Her face grew dark. She gave the cry of one from whom hope is vanishing. The cry passed into a howl. She lay writhing on the floor, a leopardess covered with spots.

“The evil thou meditatest,” Adam resumed, “thou shalt never compass, Lilith, for Good and not Evil is the Universe. The battle between them may last for countless ages, but it must end: how will it fare with thee when Time hath vanished in the dawn of the eternal morn? Repent, I beseech thee; repent, and be again an angel of God!”

She rose, she stood upright, a woman once more, and said,

“I will not repent. I will drink the blood of thy child.” My eyes were fastened on the princess; but when Adam spoke, I turned to him: he stood towering above her; the form of his visage was altered, and his voice was terrible.

“Down!” he cried; “or by the power given me I will melt thy very bones.”

She flung herself on the floor, dwindled and dwindled, and was again a gray cat. Adam caught her up by the skin of her neck, bore her to the closet, and threw her in. He described a strange figure on the threshold, and closing the door, locked it.

Then he returned to my side the old librarian, looking sad and worn, and furtively wiping tears from his eyes.

XXX Adam Explains

“We must be on our guard,” he said, “or she will again outwit us. She would befool the very elect!”

“How are we to be on our guard?” I asked.

“Every way,” he answered. “She fears, therefore hates her child, and is in this house on her way to destroy her. The birth of children is in her eyes the death of their parents, and every new generation the enemy of the last. Her daughter appears to her an open channel through which her immortality⁠—which yet she counts self-inherent⁠—is flowing fast away: to fill it up, almost from her birth she has pursued her with an utter enmity. But the result of her machinations hitherto is, that in the region she claims as her own, has appeared a colony of children, to which that daughter is heart and head and sheltering wings. My Eve longed after the child, and would have been to her as a mother to her firstborn, but we were then unfit to train her: she was carried into the wilderness, and for ages we knew nothing of her fate. But she was divinely fostered, and had young angels for her playmates; nor did she ever know care until she found a baby in the wood, and the mother-heart in her awoke. One by one she has found many children since, and that heart is not yet full. Her family is her absorbing charge, and never children were better mothered. Her authority over them is without appeal, but it is unknown to herself, and never comes to the surface except in watchfulness and service. She has forgotten the time when she lived without them, and thinks she came herself from the wood, the first of the family.

“You have saved the life of her and their enemy; therefore your life belongs to her and them. The princess was on her way to destroy them, but as she crossed that stream, vengeance overtook her, and she would have died had you not come to her aid. You did; and ere now she would have been raging among the Little Ones, had she dared again cross the stream. But there was yet a way to the blessed little colony through the world of the three dimensions; only, from that, by the slaying of her former body, she had excluded herself, and except in personal contact with one belonging to it, could not re-enter it. You provided the opportunity: never, in all her long years, had she had one before. Her hand, with lightest touch, was on one or other of your muffled feet, every step as you climbed. In that little chamber, she is now watching to leave it as soon as ever she may.”

“She cannot know anything about the door!⁠—she cannot at least know how to open it!” I said; but my heart was not so confident as my words.

“Hush, hush!” whispered the librarian, with uplifted hand;