“—­to know which,” he added, in a sudden awed whisper, “is to know the ultimate secrets of life and death, and to read the riddle of the world and the soul—­to become even as itself—­Gods.”

He stopped abruptly, and again that awful, flaming smile ran over his face, flushing it from chin to forehead with the power of his burning and tremendous belief.

Spinrobin was already weeping inwardly, without sound.  He understood at last, only too well, what was coming.  Skale’s expression held the whole wild glory, and the whole impious audacity of what seemed his blasphemous spiritual discovery.  The fires were alight in his eyes.  He stooped down lower and opened wide his capacious arms.  The next second, Spinrobin, Miriam, and Mrs. Mawle, who had unexpectedly come upon them from behind, were gathered all together against his breast.  His voice then dropped suddenly to a tiny whisper of awful joy that seemed to creep from his lips like some message too mighty to be fully known, and half lost itself among the strands of his beard.

“My wonderful redeemed children, notes in my human chord,” he whispered over their heads, “it is the Name that shall make us as God, for it is none other than the Name that rusheth through the universe”—­his breath failed him most curiously for an instant—­“the NAME OF THE ALMIGHTY!”

Chapter XII

I

A certain struggling incoherence is manifest in Spinrobin’s report of it all, as of a man striving to express violent thoughts in a language he has not yet mastered.  It is evident, for instance, as those few familiar with the “magical” use of sound in ceremonial and the power that resides in “true naming” will realize, that he never fully understood Skale’s intended use of the chord, or why this complex sound was necessary for the utterance of the complex “Name.”

Moreover, the powers concealed in the mere letters, while they laid hold upon his imagination, never fully entered his understanding.  Few minds, it seems, can conceive of any deity as other than some anthropomorphic extension of themselves, for the idea is too greatly blinding to admit human thought within a measurable distance even of a faintest conception.  The true, stupendous nature of the forces these letters in the opening syllable clothed, Spinrobin unquestionably never apprehended.  Miriam, with her naked and undefiled intuitions, due to utter ignorance of worldly things from birth, came nearer to the reality; but then Miriam was now daily more and more caught up into the vortex of a sweet and compelling human love, and in proportion as this grew she feared the great experiment that might—­so Spinrobin had suggested—­spell Loss.  Gradually dread closed the avenues of her spirit that led so fearfully to Heaven; and in their place she saw the dear yet thorny paths that lay with Spinny upon the earth.