Margrave now entered the litter, and the Veiled Woman drew the black
curtains round him. I walked on, as the guide, some yards in
advance. The air was still, heavy, and parched with the breath of the
Australasian sirocco.
We passed through the meadow-lands, studded with slumbering flocks; we
followed the branch of the creek, which was linked to its source in
the mountains by many a trickling waterfall; we threaded the gloom of
stunted, misshapen trees, gnarled with the stringy bark which makes one
of the signs of the strata that nourish gold; and at length the moon,
now in all her pomp of light, mid-heaven amongst her subject stars,
gleamed through the fissures of the cave, on whose floor lay the relics
of antediluvian races, and rested in one flood of silvery splendour upon
the hollows of the extinct volcano, with tufts of dank herbage, and wide
spaces of paler sward, covering the gold below,--Gold, the dumb symbol
of organized Matter’s great mystery, storing in itself, according as
Mind, the informer of Matter, can distinguish its uses, evil and good,
bane and blessing.
Hitherto the Veiled Woman had remained in the rear, with the
white-robed, skeleton-like image that had crept to my side unawares with
its noiseless step. Thus in each winding turn of the difficult path at
which the convoy following behind me came into sight, I had seen, first,
the two gayly-dressed, armed men, next the black bier-like litter, and
last the Black-veiled Woman and the White-robed Skeleton.
But now, as I halted on the tableland, backed by the mountain and
fronting the valley, the woman left her companion, passed by the litter
and the armed men, and paused by my side, at the mouth of the moonlit
cavern.
There for a moment she stood, silent, the procession below mounting
upward laboriously and slow; then she turned to me, and her veil was
withdrawn.
The face on which I gazed was wondrously beautiful, and severely awful.
There was neither youth nor age, but beauty, mature and majestic as that
of a marble Demeter.
“Do you believe in that which you seek?” she asked, in her foreign,
melodious, melancholy accents.
“I have no belief,” was my answer. “True science has none. True science
questions all things, takes nothing upon credit. It knows but three
states of the mind,--Denial, Conviction, and that vast interval between
the two, which is not belief, but suspense of judgment.”
The woman let fall her veil, moved from me, and seated herself on a crag
above that cleft between mountain and creek, to which, when I had first
discovered the gold that the land nourished, the rain from the clouds
had given the rushing life of the cataract; but which now, in the
drought and the hush of the skies, was but a dead pile of stones.
The litter now ascended the height: its bearers halted; a lean hand tore
the curtains aside, and Margrave descended, leaning, this time, not on
the Black-veiled Woman, but on the White-robed Skeleton.
There, as he stood, the moon shone full on his wasted form; on his
face, resolute, cheerful, and proud, despite its hollowed outlines and
sicklied hues. He raised his head, spoke in the language unknown to me,
and the armed men and the litter-bearers grouped round him, bending low,
their eyes fixed on the ground. The Veiled Woman rose slowly and came to
his side, motioning away, with a mute sign, the ghastly form on which he
leaned, and passing round him silently, instead, her own sustaining arm.
Margrave spoke again a few sentences, of which I could not even guess
the meaning. When he had concluded, the armed men and the litter-bearers
came nearer to his feet, knelt down, and kissed his hand. They then
rose, and took from the bier-like vehicle the coffer and the fuel. This
done, they lifted again the litter, and again, preceded by the armed
men, the procession descended down the sloping hillside, down into the
valley below.
Margrave now whispered, for some moments, into the ear of the hideous
creature who had made way for the Veiled Woman. The grim skeleton bowed
his head submissively, and strode noiselessly away through the long
grasses,--the slender stems, trampled under his stealthy feet, relifting
themselves, as after a passing wind. And thus he, too, sank out of sight
down into the valley below. On the tableland of the hill remained only
we three,--Margrave, myself, and the Veiled Woman.
She had reseated herself apart, on the gray crag above the dried
torrent. He stood at the entrance of the cavern, round the sides of
which clustered parasital plants, with flowers of all colours, some
amongst them opening their petals and exhaling their fragrance only in
the hours of night; so that, as his form filled up the jaws of the dull
arch, obscuring the moonbeam that strove to pierce the shadows that
slept within, it stood now--wan and blighted--as I had seen it first,
radiant and joyous, literally “framed in blooms.”