# The Conservative (Lovecraft)/October 1916/The Bond Invincible

The Bond Invincible
By David H. Whittier
The laws of infinite Goodness are not always manifested in those accustomed ways which we deem so inevitable, nor are their noblest operations always to be sought amidst those scenes of splendour where the tide of life flows with greatest strength and swiftness. Their deepest truths are ofttimes set forth among the humblest of men; for verily, they are no respecters of persons.
In a little town there once lived a youth and a maid who bore a mutual affection so strange and so intense, that not only did their neighbours marvel, but they themselves could scarce comprehend its singular and engrossing nature. From infancy the two had grown up side by side; every day drawing closer together, and becoming more and more occupied with thoughts of each other, till at length their fondness excluded many seemingly more important, and certainly more material needs and interests. Each was widely noted for a certain quiet goodness of heart, and each deserved the reputation; for all their thoughts and acts were pure beyond the common standards of mankind. They lived only for each other, and their thoughts were only of each other.
But one day a malignant demon interfered, where all before had been in the hands of God. The maid, stricken with a malady which defied the efforts of rural healers, declined with fatal rapidity toward the valley of shadows. Shortly before the end her lover reached her side, sinking by the deathbed with a silent apparent calm which revealed but little the inward fear and utter vacancy brought to his sensitive spirit by the dire calamity. He held her in his arms as her soul prepared to leave him, and as she crossed the portal of this world she whispered of her devotion, vowing that nothing in the land beyond might have power to divide them, or to draw them farther apart than they had ever been. He kissed her lips for the last time, and then the shadow fell, leaving him alone, utterly alone in space; for the world of men had never been with him, and he had lost the only world that was truly his.
They laid the maiden to rest beneath the green grasses of the hillside, whilst the youth wandered aimlessly through the village ​and the woods and fields nearby, in a strangely vacant mood which never seemed to lift. The good folk of the town often tried to speak to him, but their well-meant words caused only annoyance, and they were always repulsed; though never with roughness, for his sorrow had mellowed his nature, and made his kind heart even kinder than it had been before. His thoughts were ever outside the things about him; and though he seemed to talk sometimes, and even to try to smile, his inmost being held no real communion with those of this world. His mind was with the other, so far away, and yet so near to him in his hours of pensive solitude. His only peace came when he was alone, and thinking of her; so ere long he withdrew from the village to lead a hermit's life in the neighbouring wood.
For many years his existence was a strange one. He ate, and slept, and thought; but of these three things he thought the most, eating and sleeping only that he might think the better. He lived in a sphere of his own, above and beyond the world in which he seemed to live. The few who passed by his sylvan abode would sometimes behold him, walking slowly and calmly, with a strange, inscrutable smile of expectation on his lips; and they would wonder what it was that he expected, for to them his life seemed a blighted, wasted thing, and his mind, almost a blank. They knew, as did most of the villagers, that always he was helping others, and that many owed to him all their happiness in life. Sufferers, oppressed by lack of money or of some less material comfort, found in him a source from which seemed to flow the love and solace of God. In numbers they flocked to him, yet was none turned away. For himself he appeared to do nothing. His life was lived for others, yet he smiled and seemed to have hope of that peace which goodness brings to all who are able to rise to the heights of ascetic self-abnegation.
One day there came within the wood a caravan of wandering gypsies, who encamped as though for a long sojourn. Among their number was a girl of very singular characteristics; so young that she seemed scarce grown to that age when the mind reflects upon things unseen, yet withal so much given to deep musing, that she would frequently detach herself from the others, and sit for hours in silent, thoughtful solitude. Whenever the band made camp, this girl would withdraw from the scene of noise and bustle, for activity wearied and sickened her, imparting a strange loneliness as though some vital part of her, close to the heart, were missing. The gypsies respected her moods and feebleness and never demanded from her that labour which falls to the lot of most gypsy women. They thought her strange, and even mad, though no one had the cruelty to say so openly; for in their rough way they loved her much, and were loath to wound her sensibilities.
This night the gypsy maid wandered forth as always from the busy tribe as they prepared their encampment; but her slow and aimless steps were not quite as of yore, nor did she feel that sense of pain which was wont to harass her so poignantly. It rather seemed to her that all was but a blank, and she a phantom looking upon vacancy and seeing all in nothing. At length the sky grow dark, and many clouds, as though gathered from all quarters of the heavens, hung black and low over the wood. The girl, hardly able to guide her footsteps in ​the feeble light, seated herself upon a boulder and became lost in meaningless meditations. The wind now arose, increasing in violence till a veritable torrent of rushing air tore its way through the trees with a din whose weirdly wonderful cadences spoke a terrible intensity and soul-stultifying meaning. And as the wind waxed in fury, so waxed some vital spark within the frail breast of the gypsy. Her heart was filled with a strange and fathomless longing, and she was irresistibly forced to rise and walk ahead toward an unknown goal. Directed and impelled by her surging soul, she forget ahead through the sheets of pouring rain and the blasts of roaring wind; yet to her mind came only an added sense of calm, and a vague thought of impending great events.
But the nomad girl was not alone in the storm-racked wood. Inspired with a like premonition of coming prodigies, the hermit also was astir, treading the familiar forest aisles and hearing in the scream of the tempest a half-formed prophecy that ere this night should pass, some wonder supernal should be wrought in him. The storm abated not, but swelled to great proportions. The trees swung their wild arms above the hermit's head, the while shrieking aloud their approval of destiny and its onward march of events. On walked the man, until it seemed to him that some inward greatness, some high ethereal vapour, was pressing for escape and well-nigh stifling him. Yet through it all was a warmth as though a furnace were being born, whose fire scorched with an ardour that he felt not as most of us feel heat or cold.
The two that wandered in the wood alone, for on such a night as this no forest creature dares breast the wrath of the gale, were now walking toward each other as swiftly and directly as though drawn together by an intangible but invincible cord of destiny. Knowing not whither their progress led, save as intuition hinted, each pressed onward with vague haste. Suddenly they met and paused, exalted by a fervent glow whose cause the darkness hid. Then all at once the glade was lit by a lightning flash whose fleeting effulgence laid bare the minutest details of the momentous scene. Face to face in mutual scrutiny stood the two, the godly hermit and the gypsy girl, who until that instant had never beheld each other’s countenance. And now came to pass a marvel so great that the mind reels in the telling. Ere the flash had died away the man and the maid stretched forth their hands in an involuntary gesture of complete comprehension and recognition: and there, amid the wild tumult of the storm, came together once more the two souls that were all to each other, and that not even death had been able to sever. In reverent awe they embraced more closely than ever lovers embrace when they most grit their teeth and press each other to their bosoms with a passion which could never animate these two. Their love had always been the same. And as they stood there in sanctified silence, the heavens burst in twain. Down from the cloven empyrean shot a dazzling shaft of supernal radiance such as man had never seen before nor has seen since. A new, unearthly sort of day bathed for a second the forest and the neighbouring village; a day in whose instant of duration were heard celestial sounds like to none whereof mon know. And when the skies had closed once more upon the holy light, behold--the inky clouds rolled gently apart from above the wood, and the pale moon, soft virgin queen of night, played with ​sweet argent archery upon two bodies stretched out side by side, with smiles upon their lips and faces, and with a lingering trace of the sureness of heaven in their open but unseeing eyes.
Great was the storm, and mighty the power that had shown itself to all in the fury of the elements; yet was there revealed that night a power which, though manifest only to the two who were found so cold and silent, did in greatness surpass all the tempestuous forces so vividly displayed: even as the glory of Heaven surpasseth the splendour of earth. There is more power in the smallest thought of God or Good than there can ever be in the whole wide universe we see; even were all the various forces of that universe to be miraculously joined for a single purpose.