Many days had passed since the hut was made--how many may not be known,
since I notched no stick and knotted no cord--yet never in my rambles in
the wood had I seen that desolate ash-heap where the fire had done its
work. Nor had I looked for it. On the contrary, my wish was never to see
it, and the fear of coming accidentally upon it made me keep to the old
familiar paths. But at length, one night, without thinking of Rima’s
fearful end, it all at once occurred to me that the hated savage whose
blood I had shed on the white savannah might have only been practicing
his natural deceit when he told me that most pitiful story. If that were
so--if he had been prepared with a fictitious account of her death to
meet my questions--then Rima might still exist: lost, perhaps, wandering
in some distant place, exposed to perils day and night, and unable to
find her way back, but living still! Living! her heart on fire with
the hope of reunion with me, cautiously threading her way through the
undergrowth of immeasurable forests; spying out the distant villages
and hiding herself from the sight of all men, as she knew so well how
to hide; studying the outlines of distant mountains, to recognize some
familiar landmark at last, and so find her way back to the old wood once
more! Even now, while I sat there idly musing, she might be somewhere
in the wood--somewhere near me; but after so long an absence full of
apprehension, waiting in concealment for what tomorrow’s light might
show.
I started up and replenished the fire with trembling hands, then set the
door open to let the welcoming stream out into the wood. But Rima had
done more; going out into the black forest in the pitiless storm, she
had found and led me home. Could I do less! I was quickly out in the
shadows of the wood. Surely it was more than a mere hope that made my
heart beat so wildly! How could a sensation so strangely sudden, so
irresistible in its power, possess me unless she were living and near?
Can it be, can it be that we shall meet again? To look again into your
divine eyes--to hold you again in my arms at last! I so changed--so
different! But the old love remains; and of all that has happened
in your absence I shall tell you nothing--not one word; all shall be
forgotten now--sufferings, madness, crime, remorse! Nothing shall
ever vex you again--not Nuflo, who vexed you every day; for he is dead
now--murdered, only I shall not say that--and I have decently buried his
poor old sinful bones. We alone together in the wood--OUR wood now! The
sweet old days again; for I know that you would not have it different,
nor would I.
Thus I talked to myself, mad with the thoughts of the joy that would
soon be mine; and at intervals I stood still and made the forest echo
with my calls. “Rima! Rima!” I called again and again, and waited for
some response; and heard only the familiar night-sounds--voices of
insect and bird and tinkling tree-frog, and a low murmur in the topmost
foliage, moved by some light breath of wind unfelt below. I was drenched
with dew, bruised and bleeding from falls in the dark, and from rocks
and thorns and rough branches, but had felt nothing; gradually the
excitement burnt itself out; I was hoarse with shouting and ready to
drop down with fatigue, and hope was dead: and at length I crept back to
my hut, to cast myself on my grass bed and sink into a dull, miserable,
desponding stupor.
But on the following morning I was out once more, determined to search
the forest well; since, if no evidence of the great fire Kua-ko had
described to me existed, it would still be possible to believe that
he had lied to me, and that Rima lived. I searched all day and found
nothing; but the area was large, and to search it thoroughly would
require several days.
On the third day I discovered the fatal spot, and knew that never again
would I behold Rima in the flesh, that my last hope had indeed been
a vain one. There could be no mistake: just such an open place as the
Indian had pictured to me was here, with giant trees standing apart;
while one tree stood killed and blackened by fire, surrounded by a huge
heap, sixty or seventy yards across, of prostrate charred tree-trunks
and ashes. Here and there slender plants had sprung up through the
ashes, and the omnipresent small-leaved creepers were beginning to throw
their pale green embroidery over the blackened trunks. I looked long at
the vast funeral tree that had a buttressed girth of not less than fifty
feet, and rose straight as a ship’s mast, with its top about a hundred
and fifty feet from the earth. What a distance to fall, through burning
leaves and smoke, like a white bird shot dead with a poisoned arrow,
swift and straight into that sea of flame below! How cruel imagination
was to turn that desolate ash-heap, in spite of feathery foliage and
embroidery of creepers, into roaring leaping flames again--to bring
those dead savages back, men, women, and children--even the little ones
I had played with--to set them yelling around me: “Burn! burn!” Oh, no,
this damnable spot must not be her last resting-place! If the fire
had not utterly consumed her, bones as well as sweet tender flesh,
shrivelling her like a frail white-winged moth into the finest white
ashes, mixed inseparably with the ashes of stems and leaves innumerable,
then whatever remained of her must be conveyed elsewhere to be with me,
to mingle with my ashes at last.
Having resolved to sift and examine the entire heap, I at once set about
my task. If she had climbed into the central highest branch, and had
fallen straight, then she would have dropped into the flames not far
from the roots; and so to begin I made a path to the trunk, and when
darkness overtook me I had worked all round the tree, in a width of
three to four yards, without discovering any remains. At noon on the
following day I found the skeleton, or, at all events, the larger bones,
rendered so fragile by the fierce heat they had been subjected to, that
they fell to pieces when handled. But I was careful--how careful!--to
save these last sacred relics, all that was now left of Rima!--kissing
each white fragment as I lifted it, and gathering them all in my old
frayed cloak, spread out to receive them. And when I had recovered them
all, even to the smallest, I took my treasure home.
Another storm had shaken my soul, and had been succeeded by a second
calm, which was more complete and promised to be more enduring than the
first. But it was no lethargic calm; my brain was more active than ever;
and by and by it found a work for my hands to do, of such a character
as to distinguish me from all other forest hermits, fugitives from their
fellows, in that savage land. The calcined bones I had rescued were kept
in one of the big, rudely shaped, half-burnt earthen jars which Nuflo
had used for storing grain and other food-stuff. It was of a wood-ash
colour; and after I had given up my search for the peculiar fine clay he
had used in its manufacture--for it had been in my mind to make a more
shapely funeral urn myself--I set to work to ornament its surface. A
portion of each day was given to this artistic labour; and when the
surface was covered with a pattern of thorny stems, and a trailing
creeper with curving leaf and twining tendril, and pendent bud and
blossom, I gave it colour. Purples and black only were used, obtained
from the juices of some deeply coloured berries; and when a tint, or
shade, or line failed to satisfy me I erased it, to do it again; and
this so often that I never completed my work. I might, in the proudly
modest spirit of the old sculptors, have inscribed on the vase the
words: Abel was doing this. For was not my ideal beautiful like theirs,
and the best that my art could do only an imperfect copy--a rude sketch?
A serpent was represented wound round the lower portion of the jar,
dull-hued, with a chain of irregular black spots or blotches extending
along its body; and if any person had curiously examined these spots he
would have discovered that every other one was a rudely shaped letter,
and that the letters, by being properly divided, made the following
words:
Sin vos y siu dios y mi.
Words that to some might seem wild, even insane in their extravagance,
sung by some ancient forgotten poet; or possibly the motto of some
love-sick knight-errant, whose passion was consumed to ashes long
centuries ago. But not wild nor insane to me, dwelling alone on a vast
stony plain in everlasting twilight, where there was no motion, nor any
sound; but all things, even trees, ferns, and grasses, were stone.
And in that place I had sat for many a thousand years, drawn up and
motionless, with stony fingers clasped round my legs, and forehead
resting on my knees; and there would I sit, unmoving, immovable, for
many a thousand years to come--I, no longer I, in a universe where she
was not, and God was not.
The days went by, and to others grouped themselves into weeks and
months; to me they were only days--not Saturday, Sunday, Monday, but
nameless. They were so many and their sum so great that all my previous
life, all the years I had existed before this solitary time, now looked
like a small island immeasurably far away, scarcely discernible, in the
midst of that endless desolate waste of nameless days.
My stock of provisions had been so long consumed that I had forgotten
the flavour of pulse and maize and pumpkins and purple and sweet
potatoes. For Nuflo’s cultivated patch had been destroyed by the
savages--not a stem, not a root had they left: and I, like the sorrowful
man that broods on his sorrow and the artist who thinks only of his art,
had been improvident and had consumed the seed without putting a portion
into the ground. Only wild food, and too little of that, found with
much seeking and got with many hurts. Birds screamed at and scolded me;
branches bruised and thorns scratched me; and still worse were the angry
clouds of waspish things no bigger than flies. Buzz--buzz! Sting--sting!
A serpent’s tooth has failed to kill me; little do I care for your small
drops of fiery venom so that I get at the spoil--grubs and honey. My
white bread and purple wine! Once my soul hungered after knowledge; I
took delight in fine thoughts finely expressed; I sought them carefully
in printed books: now only this vile bodily hunger, this eager seeking
for grubs and honey, and ignoble war with little things!
A bad hunter I proved after larger game. Bird and beast despised my
snares, which took me so many waking hours at night to invent, so many
daylight hours to make. Once, seeing a troop of monkeys high up in the
tall trees, I followed and watched them for a long time, thinking how
royally I should feast if by some strange unheard-of accident one
were to fall disabled to the ground and be at my mercy. But nothing
impossible happened, and I had no meat. What meat did I ever have except
an occasional fledgling, killed in its cradle, or a lizard, or small
tree-frog detected, in spite of its green colour, among the foliage? I
would roast the little green minstrel on the coals. Why not? Why should
he live to tinkle on his mandolin and clash his airy cymbals with no
appreciative ear to listen? Once I had a different and strange kind of
meat; but the starved stomach is not squeamish. I found a serpent coiled
up in my way in a small glade, and arming myself with a long stick,
I roused him from his siesta and slew him without mercy. Rima was not
there to pluck the rage from my heart and save his evil life. No coral
snake this, with slim, tapering body, ringed like a wasp with brilliant
colour; but thick and blunt, with lurid scales, blotched with black;
also a broad, flat, murderous head, with stony, ice-like, whity-blue
eyes, cold enough to freeze a victim’s blood in its veins and make it
sit still, like some wide-eyed creature carved in stone, waiting for
the sharp, inevitable stroke--so swift at last, so long in coming. “O
abominable flat head, with icy-cold, humanlike, fiend-like eyes, I shall
cut you off and throw you away!” And away I flung it, far enough in
all conscience: yet I walked home troubled with a fancy that somewhere,
somewhere down on the black, wet soil where it had fallen, through all
that dense, thorny tangle and millions of screening leaves, the white,
lidless, living eyes were following me still, and would always be
following me in all my goings and comings and windings about in the
forest. And what wonder? For were we not alone together in this dreadful
solitude, I and the serpent, eaters of the dust, singled out and
cursed above all cattle? HE would not have bitten me, and I--faithless
cannibal!--had murdered him. That cursed fancy would live on, worming
itself into every crevice of my mind; the severed head would grow and
grow in the night-time to something monstrous at last, the hellish
white lidless eyes increasing to the size of two full moons. “Murderer!
murderer!” they would say; “first a murderer of your own fellow
creatures--that was a small crime; but God, our enemy, had made them
in His image, and He cursed you; and we two were together, alone and
apart--you and I, murderer! you and I, murderer!”
I tried to escape the tyrannous fancy by thinking of other things and by
making light of it. “The starved, bloodless brain,” I said, “has strange
thoughts.” I fell to studying the dark, thick, blunt body in my hands;
I noticed that the livid, rudely blotched, scaly surface showed in some
lights a lovely play of prismatic colours. And growing poetical, I said:
“When the wild west wind broke up the rainbow on the flying grey cloud
and scattered it over the earth, a fragment doubtless fell on this
reptile to give it that tender celestial tint. For thus it is Nature
loves all her children, and gives to each some beauty, little or much;
only to me, her hated stepchild, she gives no beauty, no grace. But
stay, am I not wronging her? Did not Rima, beautiful above all things,
love me well? said she not that I was beautiful?”
“Ah, yes, that was long ago,” spoke the voice that mocked me by the pool
when I combed out my tangled hair. “Long ago, when the soul that looked
from your eyes was not the accursed thing it is now. Now Rima would
start at the sight of them; now she would fly in terror from their
insane expression.”
“O spiteful voice, must you spoil even such appetite as I have for this
fork-tongued spotty food? You by day and Rima by night--what shall I
do--what shall I do?”
For it had now come to this, that the end of each day brought not sleep
and dreams, but waking visions. Night by night, from my dry grass bed I
beheld Nuflo sitting in his old doubled-up posture, his big brown feet
close to the white ashes--sitting silent and miserable. I pitied him; I
owed him hospitality; but it seemed intolerable that he should be there.
It was better to shut my eyes; for then Rima’s arms would be round my
neck; the silky mist of her hair against my face, her flowery breath
mixing with my breath. What a luminous face was hers! Even with
closeshut eyes I could see it vividly, the translucent skin showing the
radiant rose beneath, the lustrous eyes, spiritual and passionate, dark
as purple wine under their dark lashes. Then my eyes would open wide. No
Rima in my arms! But over there, a little way back from the fire, just
beyond where old Nuflo had sat brooding a few minutes ago, Rima would
be standing, still and pale and unspeakably sad. Why does she come to me
from the outside darkness to stand there talking to me, yet never once
lifting her mournful eyes to mine? “Do not believe it, Abel; no, that
was only a phantom of your brain, the What-I-was that you remember so
well. For do you not see that when I come she fades away and is nothing?
Not that--do not ask it. I know that I once refused to look into your
eyes, and afterwards, in the cave at Riolama, I looked long and was
happy--unspeakably happy! But now--oh, you do not know what you ask; you
do not know the sorrow that has come into mine; that if you once beheld
it, for very sorrow you would die. And you must live. But I will wait
patiently, and we shall be together in the end, and see each other
without disguise. Nothing shall divide us. Only wish not for it soon;
think not that death will ease your pain, and seek it not. Austerities?
Good works? Prayers? They are not seen; they are not heard, they are
less-than nothing, and there is no intercession. I did not know it then,
but you knew it. Your life was your own; you are not saved nor judged!
acquit yourself--undo that which you have done, which Heaven cannot
undo--and Heaven will say no word nor will I. You cannot, Abel, you
cannot. That which you have done is done, and yours must be the penalty
and the sorrow--yours and mine--yours and mine--yours and mine.”
This, too, was a phantom, a Rima of the mind, one of the shapes the
ever-changing black vapours of remorse and insanity would take; and
all her mournful sentences were woven out of my own brain. I was not
so crazed as not to know it; only a phantom, an illusion, yet more real
than reality--real as my crime and vain remorse and death to come. It
was, indeed, Rima returned to tell me that I that loved her had been
more cruel to her than her cruellest enemies; for they had but tortured
and destroyed her body with fire, while I had cast this shadow on
her soul--this sorrow transcending all sorrows, darker than death,
immitigable, eternal.
If I could only have faded gradually, painlessly, growing feebler in
body and dimmer in my senses each day, to sink at last into sleep! But
it could not be. Still the fever in my brain, the mocking voice by day,
the phantoms by night; and at last I became convinced that unless I
quitted the forest before long, death would come to me in some terrible
shape. But in the feeble condition I was now in, and without any
provisions, to escape from the neighbourhood of Parahuari was
impossible, seeing that it was necessary at starting to avoid the
villages where the Indians were of the same tribe as Runi, who would
recognize me as the white man who was once his guest and afterwards his
implacable enemy. I must wait, and in spite of a weakened body and a
mind diseased, struggle still to wrest a scanty subsistence from wild
nature.
One day I discovered an old prostrate tree, buried under a thick growth
of creeper and fern, the wood of which was nearly or quite rotten, as
I proved by thrusting my knife to the heft in it. No doubt it would
contain grubs--those huge, white wood-borers which now formed an
important item in my diet. On the following day I returned to the spot
with a chopper and a bundle of wedges to split the trunk up, but had
scarcely commenced operations when an animal, startled at my blows,
rushed or rather wriggled from its hiding-place under the dead wood at
a distance of a few yards from me. It was a robust, round-headed,
short-legged creature, about as big as a good-sized cat, and clothed
in a thick, greenish-brown fur. The ground all about was covered with
creepers, binding the ferns, bushes, and old dead branches together; and
in this confused tangle the animal scrambled and tore with a great show
of energy, but really made very little progress; and all at once it
flashed into my mind that it was a sloth--a common animal, but rarely
seen on the ground--with no tree near to take refuge in. The shock of
joy this discovery produced was great enough to unnerve me, and for some
moments I stood trembling, hardly able to breathe; then recovering I
hastened after it, and stunned it with a blow from my chopper on its
round head.
“Poor sloth!” I said as I stood over it. “Poor old lazy-bones! Did Rima
ever find you fast asleep in a tree, hugging a branch as if you loved
it, and with her little hand pat your round, human-like head; and laugh
mockingly at the astonishment in your drowsy, waking eyes; and scold
you tenderly for wearing your nails so long, and for being so ugly?
Lazybones, your death is revenged! Oh, to be out of this wood--away from
this sacred place--to be anywhere where killing is not murder!”
Then it came into my mind that I was now in possession of the supply of
food which would enable me to quit the wood. A noble capture! As much to
me as if a stray, migratory mule had rambled into the wood and found me,
and I him. Now I would be my own mule, patient, and long-suffering, and
far-going, with naked feet hardened to hoofs, and a pack of provender on
my back to make me independent of the dry, bitter grass on the sunburnt
savannahs.
Part of that night and the next morning was spent in curing the flesh
over a smoky fire of green wood and in manufacturing a rough sack to
store it in, for I had resolved to set out on my journey. How safely to
convey Rima’s treasured ashes was a subject of much thought and anxiety.
The clay vessel on which I had expended so much loving, sorrowful labour
had to be left, being too large and heavy to carry; eventually I put the
fragments into a light sack; and in order to avert suspicion from the
people I would meet on the way, above the ashes I packed a layer of
roots and bulbs. These I would say contained medicinal properties,
known to the white doctors, to whom I would sell them on my arrival at
a Christian settlement, and with the money buy myself clothes to start
life afresh.
On the morrow I would bid a last farewell to that forest of many
memories. And my journey would be eastwards, over a wild savage land of
mountains, rivers, and forests, where every dozen miles would be like a
hundred of Europe; but a land inhabited by tribes not unfriendly to the
stranger. And perhaps it would be my good fortune to meet with Indians
travelling east who would know the easiest routes; and from time to time
some compassionate voyager would let me share his wood-skin, and many
leagues would be got over without weariness, until some great river,
flowing through British or Dutch Guiana, would be reached; and so on,
and on, by slow or swift stages, with little to eat perhaps, with much
labour and pain, in hot sun and in storm, to the Atlantic at last, and
towns inhabited by Christian men.
In the evening of that day, after completing my preparations, I supped
on the remaining portions of the sloth, not suitable for preservation,
roasting bits of fat on the coals and boiling the head and bones into a
broth; and after swallowing the liquid I crunched the bones and sucked
the marrow, feeding like some hungry carnivorous animal.
Glancing at the fragments scattered on the floor, I remembered old
Nuflo, and how I had surprised him at his feast of rank coatimundi in
his secret retreat. “Nuflo, old neighbour,” said I, “how quiet you are
under your green coverlet, spangled just now with yellow flowers! It
is no sham sleep, old man, I know. If any suspicion of these curious
doings, this feast of flesh on a spot once sacred, could flit like a
small moth into your mouldy hollow skull you would soon thrust out your
old nose to sniff the savour of roasting fat once more.”
There was in me at that moment an inclination to laughter; it came
to nothing, but affected me strangely, like an impulse I had not
experienced since boyhood--familiar, yet novel. After the good-night to
my neighbour, I tumbled into my straw and slept soundly, animal-like. No
fancies and phantoms that night: the lidless, white, implacable eyes
of the serpent’s severed head were turned to dust at last; no sudden
dream-glare lighted up old Cla-cla’s wrinkled dead face and white,
blood-dabbled locks; old Nuflo stayed beneath his green coverlet; nor
did my mournful spirit-bride come to me to make my heart faint at the
thought of immortality.
But when morning dawned again, it was bitter to rise up and go away for
ever from that spot where I had often talked with Rima--the true and
the visionary. The sky was cloudless and the forest wet as if rain had
fallen; it was only a heavy dew, and it made the foliage look pale and
hoary in the early light. And the light grew, and a whispering wind
sprung as I walked through the wood; and the fast-evaporating moisture
was like a bloom on the feathery fronds and grass and rank herbage; but
on the higher foliage it was like a faint iridescent mist--a glory above
the trees. The everlasting beauty and freshness of nature was over all
again, as I had so often seen it with joy and adoration before grief and
dreadful passions had dimmed my vision. And now as I walked, murmuring
my last farewell, my eyes grew dim again with the tears that gathered to
them.