I do confess I can offer no justification for the continuation of my
story. Once so fairly sped as I was on that long-distant day, thus
recalled in such detail as I can remember, the natural and regular
thing would be that there should be an end of me, with, perhaps,
a page or two added by some kindly scribe to recall my too quickly
smothered virtues. Nevertheless, I write again, not a whit the worse
for a mischance which would have silenced many a man, and in a mood to
tell you of things wonderful enough to strain the sides of your shallow
modern skepticism, as new wine stretches a goat-skin bottle.
All the period between my death on the Druid altar and my reawakening
was a void, whereof I can say but little. The only facts pointing to a
faint clue to the wonderful lapse of life are the brief phenomena of my
reawakening, which came to hand in sequence as they are here set down.
My first consciousness was little better than a realization of the
fact that practically I was extinct. To this pointless knowledge there
came a dawning struggle with the powers of mortality, until very
slowly, inch by inch, the negativeness was driven back, and the spark
of life began to brighten within me. To this moment I cannot say how
long the process took. It may have been days, or weeks, or months, or
ages, as likely as not; but when the vital flame was kindled the life
and self-possession spread more quickly, until at last, with little
fluttering breaths like a new-born baby’s, and a tingling trickle of
warm blood down my shrunken veins, in one strange minute, four hundred
years after the close of my last spell of living (as I afterward
learned), I feebly opened my eyes, and recognized with dull contentment
that I was alive again.
But, oh! the sorrows attendant on it! Every bone and muscle in me ached
to that awakening, and my very fiber shook to the stress of the making
tide of vitality. You who have lain upon an arm for a sleepy hour or
two, and suffered as a result ingenious torments from the new-moving
blood, think of the like sorrows of four hundred years’ stagnation! It
was scarcely to be borne, and yet, like many other things of which
the like might be said, I bore it in bitterness of spirit, until life
had trickled into all the unfamiliar pathways of my clay, and then at
length the pain decreased, and I could think and move.
In that strange and lonely hour of temporal resurrection almost
complete darkness surrounded me, and my mind (with one certain
consciousness that I had been very long where I lay) was a chaos of
speculation and fancy and long-forgotten scenes. But as my faculties
came more completely under control, and my eyes accepted the dim
twilight as sufficient and convenient to them, they made out overhead
a dull, massy roof of rock, rough with the strong masonry of mother
earth, and descending in rugged sides to an uneven floor. In fact,
there could be no doubt I was underground, but how far down, and where,
and why, could not be said. All around me were cavernous hollows and
midnight shadows, round which the weird gleam of rude pillars and
irregular walls made a heavy, mysterious coast to a black, uncertain
sea. I sat up and rubbed my eyes--and as I did so I felt every rag of
clothing drop in dust and shreds from my person--and peered into the
almost impenetrable gloom. My outstretched hands on one side touched
the rough rocks of what was apparently the arch of a niche in this
chamber of the nether world, and under me they discovered a sandy
shelf, upon which I lay, some eight or ten feet from the ground, as
near as could be judged. Not a sound broke the stillness but the gentle
monotony of falling water, whereof one unseen drop, twice a minute,
fell with a faint silver cadence on to the surface of an unknown
pool. I did not fear, I was not frightened, and soon I noticed as a
set-off to the gloom of my sullen surroundings the marvelous purity
of the atmosphere. It was a preservative itself. Such an ambient,
limpid element could surely have existed nowhere else. It was soft
as velvet in its absolute stillness, and pure beyond suspicion. It
was like some thin, sunless vintage that had mellowed, endless years,
in the great vat of the earth, and it now ran with the effect of a
delicate tonic through my inert frame. Nor was its sister and ally--the
temperature--less conducive to my cure. In that subterranean place
summer and winter were alike unknown. The trivial changes that vex
the cuticle of the world were here reduced to an unalterable average
of gentle warmth that assimilated with the soulless air to my huge
contentment. You cannot wonder, therefore, that I throve apace, and
explored with increasing strength the limits of my strange imprisonment.
All about me was fine, deep dust, and shreds, which even then smelt
in my palm like remnants of fur and skins. At my elbow was a shallow
British eating-dish, with a little dust at the bottom, and by it a
broken earthenware pitcher such as they used for wine. On my other
side, as I felt with inquisitive fingers, lay a handleless sword, one
of my own, I knew, but thin with age, the point all gone, rusty and
useless. By it, again, reposed a small jar, heavy to lift, and rattling
suggestively when shaken. My two fingers, thrust into the neck, told me
it was full of coins, and I could not but feel a flush of gratitude in
that grim place at the abortive kindness which had put food and drink,
weapons and money, by my side, with a sweet ignorance, yet certainty,
of my future awakening.
But now budding curiosity suggested wider search, and, rising with
difficulty, I cautiously dropped from my lofty shelf on to the ground.
Then a wish to gain the outer air took possession of me, and, peering
this way and that, a tiny point of light far away on the right
attracted my attention. On approaching, it turned out to be a small
hole in the cave, out of reach overhead; but, feeling about below this
little star of comfort, the walls appeared soft and peaty to the touch,
so at once I was at work digging hard, with a pointed stone; and the
farther I went the more leafy and rough became the material, while hope
sent my heart thumping against my ribs in tune to my labor.
At last, impulsive, after half an hour’s work, a fancy seized me that
I could heave a way out with my shoulder. No sooner said than done. I
took ten steps back, and then plunged fiercely in the darkness of the
great cavern into the moldy screen.
How can I describe the result! It gave way, and I shot, in a whirlwind
of dust, into a sparkling, golden world! I rolled over and over down
a spangled firmament, clutching in my bewilderment, my hands full of
blue and yellow gems at every turn, and slipping and plunging, with a
sirocco of color--red, green, sapphire, and gold--flying round before
my bewildered face. I finally came to a stop, and sat up. You will not
wonder that I glared round me, when I say I was seated at the foot of
all the new marvels of a beautiful limestone knoll, clothed from top
to bottom with bluebells and primroses, spangled with the young spring
greenery of hazel and beech overhead, and backed by the cloudless blue
of an April sky!
On top of this fairy mountain, at the roots of the trees that crowned
it, hidden by bracken and undergrowth, was the round hole from which I
had plunged; nor need I tell you how, remembering what had happened in
there, I rubbed my eyes, and laughed, and marveled greatly at the will
of the Inscrutable, which had given me so wonderful a rebirth.
To you must be left to fill up the picture of my sensations and slowly
recurring faculties. How I lay and basked in the warmth, and slowly
remembered everything: to me belongs but the strange and simple
narrative.
One of my first active desires was for breakfast--nor, as my previous
meal had been four centuries earlier, will I apologize for this
weakness. But where and how should it be had? This question soon
answered itself. Sauntering hither and thither, the low shoulder of the
ridge was presently crossed, and a narrow footway in the woods leading
to some pleasant pastures entered upon. Before I had gone far up this
shady track, a pail of milk in her hand, and whistling a ditty to
herself, came tripping toward me as pretty a maid as had ever twisted a
bit of white hawthorn into her amber hair.
I let her approach, and then, stepping out, made the most respectful
salutation within the knowledge of ancient British courtesy. But, alas!
my appearance was against me, and Roman fancies had peopled the hills
with jolly satyrs, for one of which, no doubt, the damsel took me. As I
bowed low the dust of centuries cracked all down my back. I was tawny
and grim, and unshaved, and completely naked--though I had forgotten
it--and even my excellent manners could not warrant my disingenuousness
against such a damning appearance. She screamed with fear, and, letting
go her milk-jar, turned and fled, with a nimbleness which would have
left even the hot old wood-god himself far in the rear.
However, the milk remained, and peering into the pitcher, here seemed
the very thing to recuperate me by easy stages. So I retired to a
cozy dell, and, between copious draughts of that fine natural liquor,
overwhelmed with blessings the sleek kine and the comely maid who
milked them. Indeed, the stuff ran into my withered processes like a
freshet stream into a long-dry country; it consoled and satisfied me;
and afterward I slept as an infant all that night and far into another
sun.
The next day brought several needs with it. The chief of these were
more food, more clothes, and a profession (since fate seemed determined
to make me take another space of existence upon the world). All three
were satisfied eventually. As for the first two, I was not particular
as to fashion or diet, and easily supplied them. In the course of a
morning stroll a shepherd’s hut was discovered, and on approaching it
cautiously the little shed turned out to be empty. However, the owner
had left several sheepskin mantles and rough homespun clothes on pegs
round the walls, and to these I helped myself sufficiently to convert
an unclothed caveman into a passable yeoman. Also, I made free with his
store of oat-cakes and coarse cheese, putting all not needed back upon
his shelf.
Here I was again, fed and clothed, but what to do next was the
question. To consider the knotty matter, after spending most of the day
in purposeless wandering, I went up to the top of my own hill--the one
that, unknown to every one, had the cavern in it--and there pondered
the subject long. The whole face of the country perplexed me. It was
certainly Britain, but Britain so amplified and altered as to be hardly
recognizable. Wide fields were everywhere, broad roads traversed the
hills and valleys with impartial straightness, the great woodlands of
the earlier times were gone, or much curtailed, while wonderful white
buildings shone here and there among the foliage, and down away in the
west, by a river, the sunbeams glinted on the roofs and temple fronts
of a fine, unknown town. That was the place, it seemed to me at length,
to refit for another voyage on the strange sea of chance; but I was
too experienced in the ways of the world to travel cityward with an
empty wallet. While meditating upon the manner in which this deficiency
might be met, the golden store of coins left in the cave below suddenly
presented themselves. The very thing! And, as heavy purple clouds
were piling up round the presently sinking sun, earth and sky alike
presaging a storm that evening, the cavern would be a convenient place
to sleep in.
Finding the entrance with some difficulty, and noticing, but with no
special attention, that it looked a little larger than when last seen,
my first need was fire. This I had to make for myself. In the pouch of
the shepherd’s jerkin was a length of rough twine; this would do for
matches, while as a torch a resinous pine branch, bruised and split,
served well enough. Fixing one end of the string to a bush, I took a
turn round a dry stick, and then began laboriously rubbing backward and
forward. In half an hour the string fumed pleasantly, and, something
under the hour--one was nothing if not patient in that age--it charred
and burst into flame.
Just as the evening set in, and the earth opened its pores to the first
round drops of the warm-smelling rain that pattered on the young forest
leaves, and the thunder began to murmur distantly under the purple
mantle of the coming storm, my torch spluttering and hissing, I entered
the vast gloomy chamber of my sleep, and, not without a sense of awe,
stole up along the walls a hundred yards or more, to my strange couch.
The coins were safe, and shining greenly in their earthen jar; so,
sticking the light into a cleft, I poured them on to the sand, and then
commenced to tuck the stuff away, as fast as might be, into my girdle.
It was strange, wild work, the only company my own contorted shadow on
the distant rocks and such wild forms of cruel British superstition
as my excited imagination called up; the only sound the rumble of the
storm, now overhead, and the hissing drip of the red resin gleaming on
the wealth, all stamped with images of long-dead Kings and Consuls,
that I was cramming into my pouch!
By the time the task was nearly finished, I was in a state of nerves
equal to seeing or hearing anything--no doubt long fasting had shaken a
mind usually calm and callous enough--and therefore you will understand
how the blood fled from my limbs and the cold perspiration burst out
upon my forehead, when, having scarified myself with traditions of
ghouls and cave devils, I turned to listen for a moment to the dull
rumble of the thunder and the melancholy wave-like sough of the wind in
the trees, even here audible, and beheld, twenty paces from me, in the
shadows, a vast, shaggy black form, grim and broad as no mortal ever
was, and red and wavering in the uncertain light, seven feet high, and
possessed of two fiery, gleaming eyes that were bent upon my own with a
horrible fixity!
I and that monstrous shadow glared at each other until my breath came
back, when, leaning a moment more against the side of the cavern, I
suddenly snatched the torch from its cleft with a yell of consternation
that was multiplied a thousand times by the echoes until it was like
the battle-cry of a legion of bad spirits, and started off in the
supposed direction of the entrance. But before ten yards had been
covered in that headlong rush, I tripped over a loose stone, and in
another moment had fallen prone, plunging thereby the spluttering torch
into one of the many little pools of water with which the floor was
pitted. With a hiss and a splutter the light went out, and absolute
darkness enveloped everything!
Just where I had fallen stood a round boulder, a couple of yards broad,
it had seemed, and some five feet high. I sprang to this, instinctively
clutching it with my hands, just as those abominable green eyes,
brighter than ever in the vortex, got to the other side, and hesitated
there in doubt. Then began the most dreadful game I ever played, with a
forfeit attaching to it not to be thought of. You will understand the
cave was absolute sterile blackness to me, a dim world in which the
only animated points were the twin green stars of the cruel ghoul, my
unknown enemy. As those glided round to one side of the little rock, I
as cautiously edged off to the other. Then back they would come, and
back I went, now this way and now that--sometimes only an inch or two,
and sometimes making a complete circle--with every nerve at fullest
stretch, and every sense on tiptoe.
Why, all this time, it may be asked, did I not run for the entrance?
But, in reply, the first frightened turn or two round the boulder had
made chaos of my geography, and a start in any direction then might
have dashed me into the side of the cave prone, at the mercy of the
horrible thing whose hot, coarse breath fanned me quicker and quicker,
as the game grew warm and more exciting. So near was it that I could
have stretched out my hands, if I had dared, and touched the monstrous
being that I knew stood under those baleful planets that glistened in
the black firmament, now here and now there.
How long, exactly, we dodged and shuffled and panted round that stone
in the darkness cannot be said--it was certainly an hour or more;
but it went on so long that even in my panting stress and excitement
it grew dull after a time, so monotonous was it, and I found myself
speculating on the weather while I danced _vis-à-vis_ to my grim
partner in that frightful pastime.
“Yes,” I said, “a very bad storm indeed [once to the left], and nearly
overhead now [right]. It is a good thing [twice round and back again]
to be so [a sharp spin round and round--he nearly had me] conveniently
under cover [twice to the left and then back by the opposite side]!”
Well, it could not have lasted forever, and I was nearly spent. The
boulder seemed hot and throbbing to my touch, and the floor was
undulating gently, as it does when you land from a voyage; already
fifty or sixty green eyes seemed circling in fiery orbits before me,
when an extraordinary thing befell.
The thunder and lightning had been playing wildly overhead for some
minutes, and the rain was coming down in torrents (even the noise
of rushing hill streams being quite audible in that clear, resonant
space), when, all of a sudden, there came a pause, and then the fall of
a Titanian hammer on the dome of the hill, a rending, resounding crash
that shook mother earth right down to her innermost ribs.
At the same instant, before we could catch our breath, the whole
side of the cave opposite to us, some hundred paces of rugged wall,
was deluged with a living, oscillating drapery of blue flame! That
magnificent refulgence came down from above, a glowing cascade of
light. It overran the rocks like a beautiful gauze, clinging lovingly
to their sinuousness, and wrapping their roughness in a tender,
palpitating mantle of its own winsome brightness. It ran its nimble,
fiery tendrils down the veins and crevices, and leaped in fierce
playfulness from point to point, spinning its electric gossamers in
that vacuum air like some enchanted tissue spread between the crags; it
ran to the ledges and trickled off in ambient, sparkling cascades, it
overflowed the sandy bottom in tender sheets of blue and mauve, feeling
here and there with a million fingers for the way it sought, and then
it found it, and sank, as silent, as ghostly, as wonderful as it had
come!
All this was but the work of an instant, but an instant of such
concentrated brightness that I saw every detail, as I have told you,
of that beautiful thing. More; in that second of glowing visibility,
while the blue torch of the storm still shone in the chamber of the
underground, I saw the stone by me, and beyond it, towering amazed and
stupid, with his bulky strength outlined against the light, a great
cave bear in all his native ruggedness! Better still, a bowshot on my
right was the narrow approach of the entrance--and as the gleam sank
into the nether world, almost as quick as that gleam itself, with
a heart of wonder and fear, and a foot like the foot of the night
wind overhead, I was gone, and down the sandy floor, and through the
gap, and into the outer world and midnight rain I plunged once more,
grateful and glad!
* * * * *
After such hairbreadth escapes there was little need to bemoan a wet
coat and an evening under the lee of a heathery scar.
When the morning arrived, clear and bright, as it often does after a
storm, I felt in no mood to hang about the locality, but shook the rain
from my fleece, and breakfasting on a little water from the brook, a
staff in my hand, and my dear-bought wealth in my belt, set out for the
unknown town, whose wet roofs shone like molten silver over the dark
and dewy oak woods.
Five hours’ tramping brought me there; and truly the city astonished
me greatly. Could this, indeed, be Britain, was the constant question
on my tongue as I trod fair white streets, with innumerable others
opening down from them on either hand, and noticed the evidence of such
art and luxury as, hitherto, I had dreamed the exclusive prerogative
of the capital of the older empires. Here were baths before which the
Roman youth dawdled; stately theaters with endless tiers of seats, from
whose rostra degenerate sons of the soil, aping their masters in dress
and speech, recited verse and dialogue trimmed to the latest orator in
fashion by the Tiber. Mansions and palaces there were, outside which
the sleek steeds of Consuls and Prætors champed gilded bits while
waiting to carry their owners to gay procession and ceremonial; temples
to Apollo, and shrines to Venus, dotted the ways, forums, market
places, and the like, in bewildering profusion.
And among all these evidences of the new age thronged a motley mixture
of people. The thoughtful senator, coming from conclave, with his toga
and parchments, elbowed the callow British rustic in the rude raiment
of his fathers. The wild, blue-eyed Welsh Prince, upon his rough
mountain pony, would scarce give right of way to the bronzed Roman
mercenary from the Rhine: Umbrians and Franks, pale-haired Germans, and
olive Tuscans, laughed and chaffered round the booths and fountains,
while here and there legionaries stood on guard before great houses,
or drank on the tressels of wayside wine-shops. Now and again two or
three soldiers came marching down the street with a gang of slaves, or
a shock-headed chieftain from the wild north, fierce and sullen, on his
way to Rome; and over all the varied throng the crows and kites circled
in the blue sky, and the little sparrows perched themselves under the
lintel and in the twisted column tops of their mistress’s fane.
Half the day I stared, and then, having eaten some dry Etrurian
grapes--the first for four hundred years--I went to the bath and threw
down a golden coin in the doorkeeper’s marble slab.
“Why, my son,” said that juvenile official of some trivial fifty
summers, “where in the name of Mercury did you pick up this antique
thing?” and he handled it curiously. But being in no mind to tell my
tale just then, I put him off lightly, and passed on into the great
bathing place itself. Stage by stage, “balneum,” “con-camerata,”
“sudatio,” “tepidarium,” “frigidarium,” and all their other chambers, I
went through, until in the last a mighty slave, who had rubbed me with
the strength of Hercules himself for half an hour, suddenly stopped,
and, surveying me intently, exclaimed:
“Master! I have scrubbed many a strange thing from many a Roman body,
but I will swallow all my own towels if I can get this extraordinary
dirt from you,” and he pointed to my bare and glowing chest.
There, to my astonishment, revealed for the first time, was a great
serpent-like mark of tattoo and woad circling my body in two wide
zones! What it meant, how it came, was past my comprehension. Shrunk
and shriveled as I was with long abstemiousness, it seemed but like
a gigantic smudge meandering down my person--a smudge, however, that
with a little goodly living might stretch out into an elaborate design
of some nature. Of course, I knew it was thus the British warriors
were accustomed to adorn themselves, but who had been thus purposely
decorating one that had never knowingly submitted to the operation, and
to what end, was past my guessing.
“Never mind, sir, don’t despond,” said the slave. “We will have another
essay.” And hitching me on to the rubbing couch, he knelt upon my
stomach--these bath attendants were no more deferential than they are
now--and exerted his magnificent strength, armed with the stiffest
towel that ever came off a loom, upon me, until I fairly thought that
not only would he have the tattoo off, but also all the skin upon which
it was engrossed. But it was to no purpose. He rose presently and
sulkily declared I had had my money’s worth. “The more he rubbed, the
bluer those accursed marks became.” This might well be, so I tossed him
an extra coin, and, dressing hastily, covered my uninvited tattoo and
went forth, fully determined to examine and read it--for those things
were nearly always readable--more closely on a better and more private
opportunity.
My next visit was to an Etruscan barber, who was shaving all and sundry
under a green-white awning, in a pleasant little piazza. To him I sat,
and while he reaped my antique stubble, with many an exclamation of
surprise and disgust at its toughness, my thoughts wandered away to the
train of remembrances the bath slave’s discovery had started. Again
I thought of Blodwen and my little one; the seaport, with its golden
beaches, and the quiet pools where the trout and salmon of an evening
now and again shattered the crystal mirror of the surface in their
sport as she and I sat upon some grassy bank and talked of village
statecraft, of conquests over petty princelings, of crops and harvests,
of love and war. Then, again, I thought of the Roman galleys, and
Cæsar the penman autocrat; of the British camp, and, lastly, the great
mischance which had, and yet had not, ended me.
“Ah, that was a bad slash, indeed, sir, wasn’t it?” queried the barber
in my ear. “May I ask in what war you took it?”
This very echo of my fancy came so startlingly true, I sprang to my
feet and glowered upon him.
“O culler of herbs,” I said, “O trespasser along the verge of mystery
and medicine”--pointing to the dried things and electuaries with which,
in common then with his kind, his booth was stocked--“where got you the
power of reading minds?”
He shook his head vaguely, as though he did not understand, pointing
to my neck, and replying he knew naught of what my thoughts might have
been, but there, on my shoulder, was obvious evidence of the “slash” he
had alluded to.
I took the steel mirror he offered me, and, sure enough, I saw a
monstrous white seam upon my tawny skin, healed and well, but very
obvious after the bath and shaving.
“Why, sir, I have dressed many a wound in my time, but that must have
been about as bad a one as a man could get and live. How did it happen?”
“Oh, I forget just now.”
“Forget! Then you must have a marvelously bad memory. Why, a thing
like that one might remember for four hundred years!” said the
sagacious little barber, bending his keen eyes on me in a way that
was uncomfortable. In fact, he soon made me so ill at ease, being
very reluctant that my secret should pass into possession of the town
through his garrulous tongue, that I hastily paid him another of those
antique green coins of mine, and passed on again down the great wide
street.
Even he who lives two thousand years is still the serf of time,
therefore I cannot describe all the strange things I saw in that
beautiful foreign city set down on the native English land. But
presently I tired, and, having become a Roman by exchanging my
sheepskins for a fine scarlet toga, over a military cuirass of
close-fitting steel, inlaid, after the fashion, with turquoise and
gold enamel, sandals upon my feet, and a short sword at my side, I
sought somewhere to sleep. First, I chanced upon a little house set
back from the main thoroughfare, and over the door a withered bush, and
underneath it, on a label, was written thus:
........................................
. .
. _Hic Habitat Felicitas_ .
. .
........................................
“Ah!” I said, as I hammered at the portal with the brass knob of
my weapon, “if, indeed, happiness is landlord here, then Phra the
Phœnician is the man to be his tenant!” But it would not do. Bacchus
was too bibulous in that little abode, and Cupid too blind and
indiscriminate. So it was left behind, and presently an open villa was
reached where travelers might rest, and here I took a chamber on one
side of the square marble courtyard, facing on a garden and fountain,
and looking over a fair stretch of country.
No sooner had I eaten, than, very curious to understand the nature of
the bath slave’s discoveries upon my skin, I went to the disrobing-room
of the private baths, and, discarding my gorgeous cuirass, and piling
the gilded arms and silken wrappings with which a new-born vanity had
swathed me, in a corner, I stood presently revealed in the common
integument--the one immutable fashion of humanity. But rarely before
had the naked human body presented so much diversity as mine did. I was
mottled and pictured, from my waist upward, in the most bewildering
manner, all in blue and purple tints, just as the slave had said. There
were more pictures on me than there are on an astrologer’s celestial
globe; and as I turned hither and thither, before my great burnished
metal mirror, a whole constellation, of dim, uncertain meaning, rose
and set upon my sphere! Now this was the more curious, because, as I
have said, I had never in my life submitted me for a moment to the
needle and unguents of those who in British times made a practice of
the art of tattooing. I had seen young warriors under that painful
process, and had stood by as they yelled in pain and reluctant patience
while the most elaborate designs grew up, under the stolid draftsman’s
hands, upon their quivering cuticle. But, to Blodwen’s grief, who would
have had me equal to any of her tribesmen in pattern as in place, I had
ever scorned to be made a mosaic of superstition and flourishes. How,
then, had this mighty maze, this pictorial web of blue myth and marvel,
grown upon me during the night time of my sleep? On studying it closely
it evolved itself into some order, and, though that night I made not
very much of it, yet, as time went on, and my body grew sleek and
fair with good living, the design came up with constantly increasing
vigor. Indeed, the narrative I translated from it was so absorbingly
interesting to one in my melancholy circumstances that again and again
I would hurry away to my closet and mirror to see what new detail, what
subtle deduction of stroke or line, had come into view upon the scroll
of the strangest diary that ever was written.
For, indeed, it was Blodwen’s diary that circled me thus. It began in
the small of my back with the year of my demise upon the Druid altar,
and ever as she wrote it she must have rolled, with tender industry,
her journal over and over, and so worked up from my back, in a splendid
widening zone of token and hieroglyphic, for twenty changing seasons,
until my chest was reached, and there the tale ran out in a thin and
tremulous way, which it made my heart ache to understand.
There is no need to describe exactly the mode of deduction, or how
I came to comprehend, without key or help, the sense of the things
before me, but you will understand my wits were sharp in the quest, and
once the main scheme of the idea was understood the rest came easily
enough. The Princess, then, had taken a sheaf of corn as her symbol of
the year. There were twenty of them upon me, and I judged their very
varying sizes were intended to indicate good or bad harvest seasons in
the territories of my careful chieftainess. Round these central signs
she had grouped such other marks or outlines as served to hint the
changing fortunes of the times. There were heads of oxen by each sheaf,
varying in size according to the conditions of her herds; and fishes,
big or small, to indicate what luck her salmon spearsmen had met with
by the tuneful rapids of that ancient stream I knew so well.
Following these early designs was one that interested me greatly.
The gentle chieftainess had, when I left her, expectation of another
member to her tribe of her own providing. I had thought when we
should have beaten the Romans to hurry back, and mayhap be in time to
welcome this little one; but you know how I was prevented; and now
here upon my skin, nigh over to my heart, was the sketch and outline
of what seemed a small, new-born maid, all beswaddled in the British
fashion, and very lovingly limned. But what was more curious, was that
its wraps were turned back from its baby shoulder, and there, to my
astonished interpretation, in that silent maternal narrative, was just
the likeness, broad, lasting, indelible, of the frightful scar I wore
myself! Long I pondered upon this. Had that red-haired slave-princess
by some chance received me back--perhaps at Sempronius’s compassionate
hands--all hurt as I was, and had that portentous wound set its seal
during anxious vigils upon the unborn babe? I could not guess--I could
but wonder--and, wondering still, pass on to what came next.
Here was a graphic picture, no bigger than the palm of my hand, and not
hard to unriddle. An eagle--no doubt the Roman one--engaged in fierce
conflict with a beaver--that being Blodwen’s favorite tribal sign, for
there were many of those animals upon her river. Jove! how well ’twas
done! There were the flying feathers, and the fur, and the turmoil and
the litter of the fight, and well I guessed the proud Roman bird--that
day he brought my gallant tribe under the yoke--had lost many a
stalwart quill, and damaged many a lordly pinion!
And besides these main records of this fair and careful chancelloress
of her State, there were others that moved me none the less. Yes! by
every gloomy spirit that dwelt in the misty shadows of the British
oaks, it gave me a hot flush of gratified revenge to see--there by the
symbol of the first year--a severed, bleeding head, still crowned with
the Druid oak.
“Oh! oh! Dhuwallon, my friend,” I laughed, as I guessed the meaning of
that bloody sign, “so they tripped you up at last, my crafty villain.
By all the fiends of your abominable worship, I should like to have
seen the stroke that made that grisly trophy! Well, I can guess how it
came about! Some slighted tribesman who saw me die peached upon you.
Liar and traitor! I can see you stand in that old British hall, strong
in your sanctity and cunning, making your wicked version of the fight
and my undoing, and then, methinks, I see Blodwen leap to her feet, red
and fiery with her anger. Accursed priest! how you must have sickened
and shrunk from her fierce invective, the headlong damnation of her
bitter accusation, with all the ready evidence with which she supported
it. Mayhap your cheeks were as pale that day, good friend, as your
infernal vestments, and first you frowned, and pointed to the signs and
symbols of your office, and pleaded your high appointment before the
assembled people against the answering of the charge. And then, when
that would not do, you whined and cringed, and called her kinswoman.
Oh, but I can fancy it, and how my pretty Princess--there upon her
father’s steps--scorned and cursed you before them all, and how some
ready, faithful hand struck you down, and how they tore your holy linen
from you and dragged you, screaming, to the gateway, and there upon the
threshold log struck your wicked head from your abominable shoulders!
By the sacred mistletoe, I can read my Blodwen’s noble anger in every
puncture of that revenge-commemorating outline!”
Here again, in the years that followed, it pleasured me to see her
little State grow strong and wide. At one time she typified the coming
and destruction of two peak-sailed southern pirates, and then the
building of a new stockade. She also made (perhaps to the worship of my
manes!) a mighty circle. It began with a single upright on my side. The
next year there were two. In the summer that followed she crossed them
by a third great slab, and so on for ten years the tribesmen seemed
to have toiled and labored until they had such a temple of the sun as
must have given my sweet heathen vast pleasure to look upon! She feared
comments and portents much, and punctured me with them most exactly;
she kept her memoranda of corn-pots and stores of hides upon me, like
the clever, frugal mother of her tribe she was; and now and then she
acquired territory, or made new alliances--printing the special tokens
of their heads in a circle with her own, until I was illustrated from
waist to shoulder--a living lexicon of history.
Many were the details of that strange blue record I have not mentioned;
many are the strokes and flourishes that still expand and contract to
the pulsations of my mighty life--undeciphered, unintelligible. But I
have said enough to show you how ingenious it was--how sufficient in
its variety, how disappointing in its pointless end. For, indeed, it
stopped suddenly at the twentieth season, and the cause thereof I could
guess only too well!
There, in that Roman hotel, I stayed, reflecting. It was in this
rest-house, from the idle gossip of the loungers and chatter of Roman
politicians, that I came to comprehend the extent of my sleep in the
cave, and as the truth dawned upon me, with a consciousness of the
infinite vacuity of my world, I went into the garden, and there was
no light in the sunshine, and no color in the flowers, and no music
in the fountain, and I threw my toga over my head and grieved for my
loneliness, with the hum of the crowd outside in my ears, and mourned
my fair Princess and all the ancient times so young in memory, yet so
old in fact.
Many days I sorrowed purposeless, and then my grief was purged by the
good medicine of hardship and more adventure.