He knew no rest; for all his dreams were haunted by her; and when he
sought love, she came as the dead come between the living. So that,
weary of his life, he passed away at last in the fevered summer of a
tropical city; dying with her name upon his lips. And his face was no
more seen in the palm-shadowed streets; but the sun rose and sank as
before.
And that vague phantom life, which sometimes lives and thinks in the
tomb where the body moulders, lingered and thought within the narrow
marble bed where they laid him with the pious hope--que en paz descanse!
Yet so weary of his life had the wanderer been that he could not even
find the repose of the dead. And while the body sank into dust the
phantom man found no rest in the darkness, and thought to himself, "I
am even too weary to rest!"
There was a fissure in the wall of the tomb. And through it, and
through the meshes of the web that a spider had spun across it, the
dead looked, and saw the summer sky blazing like amethyst; the palms
swaying in the breezes from the sea; the flowers in the shadows of the
sepulchres; the opal fires of the horizon; the birds that sang, and
the river that rolled its whispering waves between tall palms and
vast-leaved plants to the heaving emerald of the Spanish Main. The
voices of women and sounds of argentine laughter and of footsteps and
of music, and of merriment, also came through the fissure in the wall
of the tomb; sometimes also the noise of the swift feet of horses, and
afar off the drowsy murmur made by the toiling heart of the city. So
that the dead wished to live again; seeing that there was no rest in
the tomb.
And the gold-born days died in golden fire;--and the moon whitened
nightly the face of the earth; and the perfume of the summer passed
away like a breath of incense;--but the dead in the sepulchre could not
wholly die.
The voices of life entered his resting-place; the murmur of the world
spoke to him in the darkness; the winds of the sea called to him
through the crannies of the tomb. So that he could not rest. And yet
for the dead there is no consolation of tears!
The stars in their silent courses looked down through the crannies of
the tomb and passed on; the birds sang above him and flew to other
lands; the lizards ran noiselessly above his bed of stone and as
noiselessly departed; the spider at last ceased to renew her web of
magical silk; the years came and went as before, but for the dead there
was no rest!
And it came to pass that after many tropical moons had waxed and
waned, and the summer was come, with a presence sweet as a fair
woman's--making the drowsy air odorous about her--that she whose name
was uttered by his lips when the Shadow of Death fell upon him, came to
that city of palms, and to the ancient place of burial, and even to the
tomb that was nameless.
And he knew the whisper of her robes; and from the heart of the dead
man a flower sprang and passed through the fissure in the wall of the
tomb and blossomed before her and breathed out its soul in passionate
sweetness.
But she, knowing it not, passed by; and the sound of her footsteps died
away forever!