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laboriously and slow; then she turned to me, and her veil was withdrawn.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."