The episodes I now relate are so strange, so nearly impossible, that
I hesitate to set them down lest you should call me untruthful and a
_jongleur_; nevertheless, they are told as they occurred, and you must
believe them as you may.
My quaint recluse had not been slain that night we tried his infernal
engine, but had lain in a long swoon after I carried him from amid the
wreck and débris of his den out into the moonlight. That swoon, indeed,
lasted for a whole day and night; and Elizabeth wrung her white hands
over her father’s seeming lifeless body, while Emanuel picked his
yellow teeth reflectively with his dagger-point at the couch-foot, and
Dame Margery spent all her art in unguents and salves upon the luckless
inventor ere he showed signs of returning life.
At last, however, he revived, and made a long, slow recovery of many
days under the gentle ministering of his women. And while he throve
hour by hour in the spring sunshine on the bench of his porch, I wooed
his daughter in wayward, dissatisfied kind, and laughed scornfully at
the black Spaniard’s jealous scowls, and won the mellow heart of the
old dame by my gallantness and courtesy. But it was child’s play. I
longed again to feel the hot pulse of keen emotions throbbing in my
veins, to struggle with some strong tide of hot adventure, and so at
last I had made up my mind to leave my good host and hostess at an
early season, and, turning soldier again, espouse the first quarrel
which chance threw in my way.
Then one day it happened--a strange day indeed to me--old Master Andrew
Faulkener had grown weary of his cranks and fan-wheels, and had gone
for solace to his dusty tomes and classics. Exploring amid them, in an
eventful moment he had taken down a missal penned by some old Saxon
monk, and turned to a passage he must have known well, since it was
marked and thumbed. And while the ancient scholar read and mumbled over
that quaint black letter with its gorgeous gold and crimson uncials,
I, who chanced to stand a little way apart, saw the wan blood mount
in a thin pink glow to the enthusiast’s cheeks, and in that flush
recognized that he was warm upon another quest. He mumbled and muttered
to himself, and while he sauntered up and down, or stopped now and then
to thumb and pore over that leathern volume, I caught, in disjointed
fragments, some pieces of his thoughts. “Ha! ha! a most likely find
indeed, a splendid treasure-house of trophies--and to think that no
one but old Ambrose and I wot of it, ho! ho! What does he say? ‘And
in this place was destroyed a noble house, and the anger of the Lord
fell on the pagan defenders, and they were slain one and all. Ah! God
leveled their idolatrous dwelling-places and scattered their ashes to
the four winds of heaven, and with them were destroyed--the common
legend sayeth--all their hoards of brass and silver, all their accursed
images of bronze and gold, all their trinkets and fine raiment, so that
the vengeance of the Lord was complete, and the heathen was utterly
wiped out.’ Good, very good, Brother Ambrose,” muttered the old man
with chuckling pleasure. “And now, where did this thing happen? ‘This
house which harbored so much lewdness stood on the hillock by the road
a few miles from the river, and had all that land which now is holy
perquisite to the neighboring abbey.’ Good! good!--for certain ’tis the
very spot I thought of--a happy, happy chance that made me light upon
this passage--I who live so near the spot it speaks of--I who alone of
thousands can use it as the golden key to unlock such a sweet mine of
relics as that buried pagan home must be. Oh! Ambrose, I am grateful,”
and patting the musty monkish tome in childish pleasure, he replaced it
reverently upon its shelf.
Then up and down he paced, the student’s passion burning hot within
him, muttering as he went: “Why not to-night? Why not, why not? There
is no season better for such a work than soon, and I have my license,”
whereon he went to a peg on the wall and fumbled in the wallet of the
ragged cloak I had seen him wear the night we met. In a minute out came
a brand-new scroll of parchment, neatly rolled and folded, and stamped
with the Royal seal. That scroll Andrew Faulkener undid, and, setting
his horn glasses on his nose, began to read the paper at arm’s length
with inarticulate sounds of rapture. It seemed to delight him so much
that presently I sauntered over to share in the merriment, forgetting
I had thus far been unobserved; but when we came within two paces of
each other the scholar, perceiving me, with a cry of dismay stuffed
the crushed parchment hurriedly into his bosom as though he thought
himself about to be robbed of something precious by a sudden ambuscade.
However, in a minute he recognized the robber, and was reassured, yet
undecided still, and inch by inch the white roll came forth, while
the old man kept his eyes fixed on mine. What were his scripts and
scrolls to me? I smiled to note the store he set by them: there was
not one of those poor things could interest me more nearly than a last
year’s leaf from the garden yonder--and yet, strange to say, that
white roll, creeping into light from under his rusty gaberdine, did
attract me somehow. Long life and strange experience have wakened in
me senses dormant in other mortals, and I begin to be conscious of a
knowledge beyond common knowing, a sense behind other senses, which
grows with practice, and seems ambitious by and by to bridge the gulf
which separates tangible from unreal, and what is from what will be.
That growing perspicacity within me smelled something of weight about
Faulkener’s writing more than usual, and with my curiosity gently
roused, I queried:
“That seems a script of value, sir. Is its interest particular or
public?”
“In some ways, good youth,” Faulkener answered hesitatingly, as he
unfolded the scroll so slowly as though he were jealous even of the
prying sunshine, “in some ways the interest of what this is the key to
is very general, and in other ways it is, at least for some time to
come, most private.”
“Enough!” I said, “and I am sorry to have questioned you; but your
pleasure in the tome over there suggested just now that this were some
general matter of curiosity--some dark passage in history whereon,
perhaps, two minds might shed more light than one. I ask indulgence for
intrusion.”
“Nay, but stop a minute! History, did you say? Why, this is history;
this is the birthscript of a brand-new page in history; this is leave
to turn a leaf no other fingers have ever turned, to spell out in sweet
ashes and lovely fragments a whole chapter, perchance, of the bygone.
Boy!” cried the old fellow, grasping my arm with his lean fingers, and
whispering in my ear as though he dreaded the grinning mummy of Pharaoh
in the shadow might play eavesdropper, “can you keep a secret?”
“Ay! fairly, when it does not interest me.”
“Why, then--there, take that and read it,” and Faulkener thrust the
roll into my hands, and cast himself into an attitude, and crossed
his arms upon his chest, and stared at me from under his shaggy
eyebrows as if he fancied to see fear and wonder and delight fly over
my countenance while my eyes devoured that precious deed of his. What
was there so wonderful in it? The thing was sealed and tasseled, the
ink and paper were new, the parchment white; it was, in fact, the
very vellum Faulkener had been on his way to beg at Court when we two
met--a wonderful chance, as you shall presently see, an extraordinary
hap indeed that brought me to his side out of the great wastes of time
at the very instant when that ancient scholar was on the road to ask
that license. But I did not know while I read how nearly the parchment
touched me. It looked just an ordinary missive from high authority to
humble petitioner, profuse and verbose, signed and counter-signed, and,
amid a wilderness of words, just a grain of sense that I construed as
giving the bearer leave to seek for treasure on certain lands therein
mentioned, and adopt the same to his proper pleasure without tax or
drawback.
“This may be a golden key, Sir,” was my response, as the thing was
handed back, “but it is difficult to learn anything of the door it
opens by looking on it.”
“Yet, nevertheless, young man, it is a golden key, and you shall see
me use it, for if, as yonder broken engine hints, the Fates will that
I may not pry into the misty future, yet with their leave, with the
help of this and you, will I peep into the even more shadowy past. Were
you ever at the opening of an ancient crypt--a stony hiding-place, for
instance, where dead men’s bones lay all about mid dim gems and the
rusty iron playthings of love and war?”
“I do recall one such an episode.”
“And did it not affect you greatly?”
“Greatly indeed.”
“Ay, boy, and this that I will show you shall affect you more--we two
will turn a leaf which shall read as clear to you as though you had
been at the writing of it a thousand years before. It is a grassy
hillock, and you shall lift that sod with me, and, if this thing is as
I think it is, oh! you shall start at what you find, and coward ague
shall unstring your soldier legs, you shall be dumb with wonder, and
ply your mattock with damp, fearful awe beaded on your forehead, and
starting eyes fixed fast in horrid pleasure on what we will unearth.
Ay, if you have a spark of generous comprehension, if one drop of the
milk of kindness still bides within you, you shall people this place
we go to find with such teeming, sprightly fancies, such moving
mockeries of frail human kind new risen from their ashes at your feet,
that you shall wring your hands out of pure rue for them that were,
and pluck your beard in dumb chagrin, and beat upon your heart, even
to watch all that which once was ruddy valor and hot love, and white
beauty go adrifting so upon the dusty evening wind! You will come with
me?”
“Old man!” I said, pacing up and down with folded arms and bent head,
“’twas upon my tongue to say I would not--I had a fair tryst to keep
this evening, and something that I have seen of late makes such
ventures as you have planned doubly distasteful to me; ’twas in my
mind to laugh and shake my head--but, gods! you have stirred a pulse
within me that rouses me with resistless wonder; your words tell on me
strangely--there is something in that you say which echoes through my
heart like the footfall of a storm upon the hollow earth, and I can do
nothing but listen and acquiesce. I will come!”
“Good youth, good youth, I knew you would; and, that our hopes may not
suffer by delay, let us prepare at once. Get you mattock, spade, and
pick, with whatever other tools your strength shall need, and I will
feed and have my pretty palfrey saddled, and con yon crabbed passage
over once again. So we will be ready; and at nightfall, under the
yellow stars, will start upon a venture that you shall think on for
many a day.”
I bent my head, and we did as Faulkener suggested. But a strange
unrest possessed me. When spade and mattock were hidden where we could
take them up in secret (for we did not wish our enterprise too widely
known), the time hung wondrously heavy on hand. All the tedious hours
before sunset I was oppressed with an anxiety quaint and inexplicable;
half wishing by turns I had not promised to join the mad old fellow in
his moonlight quest, and then laughing my scruples down and becoming
as restless for the start as before I had been reluctant. As for the
scholar himself, the very shirt of Dejanira possessed him, and his
impatience shone behind his yellow wrinkled face like a candle inside
a horn lantern. Somehow the hours wore through, however, and when the
evening was come, we set forth, Faulkener pale and eloquently raving
from astride of that mean palfrey whose sumpter pad was loaded with our
tools on one side, and on the other a monster sack wherein to bring
back all the treasure we were to rifle, and I on foot leading that
gentle beast, and thoughtful, past proportion or reason.
At first we pushed on at a brisk pace by familiar roads, but after a
time our path lay more to the eastward, the scholar said, and once
off the broad white track leading to the nearest town the road grew
narrower and more narrow. On we went in silence, mile after mile; by
rutty lanes where twittering bats flitted up and down the black arcades
of overhanging bush and brier; by rushy flats where the water stood wan
and dim in the uncertain light; now brushing by the heavy, dew-laden
branches of a woodman’s path through deep thickets of oak and beech,
and then following a winding sheep-track over ling and gorse. So somber
was that way, and so few the signs of life, I wondered how the scholar
kept even the direction; but he was a better pilot than he seemed, and,
while he ranted silently upon the sky and waved his hands in ghostly
rhythm to his unspoken thoughts, I found from a chance word or two he
was in some kind watching the stars, and leading us forward by their
dim light toward that goal whereof he had got knowledge from his musty
tomes. On we went through the still starry night, pacing along from
black shadows to black shadows, and moonlight to silver moonlight,
until it must have been within an hour or two of day-breaking, for
under the purple pall of sky there was a long stream of pale light in
the east. It was about that time, and the night shadows were strong
and ebony, and the cold breath and deep hush of a coming morning hung
over everything when Faulkener first began to hesitate, and presently
confessed that that which he sought for should be somewhere here, but
in the glimmer of the starlight he was uncertain whether it lay to
right or left. We halted, and, mounting on a hillock, peered all about
us, but to little purpose, fur the somber night hid everything, the
massed forest trees rose tier upon tier on every hand, like mountain
ranges running on indefinite into the gloomy passes of the clouds, and
the chance gleams of moonlight, lying white and still upon the dew-damp
meadows, were so like great misty lakes and rivers, it were difficult
to say whether they were such or no.
So back we scrambled once more, and unhitched our patient beast from
the hazel whereto we had tied him, and plunged on again by dingle and
sandy road, and rough woodland path, until we were hopelessly mazed,
and there seemed nothing for it but to wait till daylight or go empty
back. Yet, reluctant to do either, we held to it a little, hoping some
chance might favor us. ’Twas past midnight--not a crow of distant cock
or yelp of village cur broke the dead stillness, and we were plodding
down a turfy road, when on a sudden our patient steed threw forward
his ears and came to a dead stop, and, almost the same minute, the
gray clad figure of a countryman in long cape and hood, a wide slouch
hat upon his head, and a tall staff in his hand, came out from the
depth a hundred yards ahead of us, and with slow, measured gait and
bent face walked down toward us. Old Faulkener was overjoyed. Here was
one who knew the country, and would show us his precious hillock;
and he shouted to that stranger, and tugged his palfrey’s rein. But
that observant beast was strangely reluctant; he went on a pace, then
stopped and backed and pawed the silent ground, throwing his prick ears
forward, whinnying, and staring at that silent coming stranger, with
strange disquiet in every movement. And I--I sympathized with that dumb
brute; and, as the countryman came near, somehow my blood ran cold and
colder; my tongue, that was awag to ask the way, stuck helpless to my
teeth; a foolish chill beset my limbs; and, by the time we met, I had
only wit enough left to stare, speechless, at that gray form, in silent
expectation. But the old philosopher did not feel these tremors. He was
delighted at our good luck, and, fumbling in his wallet, pulled out a
small silver piece which he tendered to the man, explaining at the same
time our need and asking him to guide us.
The stranger took the coin in silence, and, keeping his face hidden in
the shadow of his hat, said the mound was near, “he knew it well, he
had bided by it long,” and he would willingly show us where it lay.
Back we went by copse and heather, back for half a mile, then turned
to the right, and in a few minutes more came out of the brushwood into
the starlight, and there at our very feet the ground was swelling up in
gentle sweep to the flat top of a little island-hill lost in the sea of
forest-land about it. It was the place we came for, and the scholar,
without another thought for us, joyfully pricked his steed to the rise,
and was soon out of sight round the shoulder of the ground.
But I! Oh, what was that strange, dull hesitation that made my feet
heavy as lead upon that threshold? Whence came those thronging,
formless fancies that crowded to my mind as I surveyed that
smoothly-rounded hillock, and all the fantastic shadows beyond it?
That spot was the same one I had wandered to when I walked lonely
from Faulkener’s house, and mere chance brought me to it anew at dead
midnight; and all the old thrills of indistinct remembrance I then had
felt were working in me again with redoubled force, moving my soul to
such unrest that I bent my head and hid my eyes, and strove long but
vainly to recall why or when I had last trodden that soil, as somewhere
and somehow I was certain that I had. Thinking and thinking without
purpose, presently I looked up, and there, two paces away was still
that gray hedgeman leaning on his staff and regarding me from under
his country hat with calm, soulless attention. I had forgotten his
presence, and it was so strange to see him there, so rustic and so
stately, that I started back, and an unfamiliar chill beset me for an
instant. But it was only a moment, then, angry to have been surprised,
I turned haughtily upon him, and, with folded arms, in mockingness of
his own stern attitude, stared proudly into those black shadows where
should have been his face. Jove! ’twas a stare that would not have
blanched for all the lightning in a Cæsar’s eye or wavered one moment
beneath the grim returning gaze of any tyrant that ever lived; and yet,
even as I looked into that void my soul turned to water, and my eyelids
quivered and bent and drooped, my arms fell loose and nerveless to my
side, and every power of free action forsook me.
That being took my perturbation with the same cold lack of wonder he
had shown throughout. He eyed me for a minute with his sleepy, stately
calm, and then he said: “You have been here before.”
“Yes,” I answered, “but how or when only the great gods know”--and
though I noticed it not at the moment, yet since it has flashed upon me
as another link in a wondrous chain, that at that moment both I and
the gray countryman were using the long-forgotten British tongue!
“And would you know, would you recall?” he queried in his passionless
voice.
“Ay, if it is within your power to stir my memory, stir it, in the
name of loud Taranis, of old Belenus, and all the other fiends I once
believed in!”
“Well sworn, Phœnician!” said the tall nocturnal wanderer, and without
another word grasped his staff and, signing me to follow, led round
the shoulder of the hillock to where, alone and solitary, we two were
stayed by a trickling rivulet that sprang from a grassy basin in the
slope, and went by a little rushy course winding down into the dusky
thickets beyond. At that pool my guide stopped suddenly, then, pointing
with stern finger still shrouded under the folds of his ample cloak:
“Drink!” he cried. “Drink and remember!”
I could no more have thwarted him than I could have torn that solid
mound from off its base, and down I went upon one knee, and took a
broken crock some shepherd had left behind, and filled it, and put it
to my lips and drank. Then up I leaped with a wild yell of wonder and
astonishment, while right across the sullen midnight sky, it seemed,
there shot out in one broad living picture all the painted pageantry of
my Roman life. I saw old Roman Britain rise before me, and the quaint
templed towns of a splendid epoch leap into shape from the tumbled
chaos of the evening clouds. I saw the crowded episodes that had
followed after the rewakening in the cave where my princess had laid
me; the faces of my jolly long-dead comrades seemed thronging round
about me; I heard the street cries of a Roman-British city; I saw the
dust rise, and the glitter as the phalanges wheeled and turned upon the
castra before the porch where, a gay patrician gallant, I lounged in
gold and turquoise armor. I saw Electra’s ivory villa start into form
and substance out of the pale, filtering Tudor moonlight, and the great
white bull, and the haughty lady, stately and tall, beckoning me up her
marble steps; and then I was with her, her petted youth, lying indolent
and happy, toying disdainfully with the imperial love she proffered
me, while we filled our rainbow shells from that bright fountain that
spurted in her inner court!
With a wild cry I dropped the shepherd’s crock and started back. The
water I was sipping was the water of Electra’s courtyard fountain!
Gods! there was none other like it. Often we two had drunk of that
crystal torrent as it burst, full of those sweet earth-salts the Romans
loved so well, from the bowels of the earth straight into her pearly
basins; the last time I had stooped to it was on that night of fiery
combat when Electra’s villa fell--and here I was sipping of it again,
so strangely and unexpectedly that I hid my eyes a space, scarce
knowing what might happen next. When I uncovered them the black dusty
clouds had swallowed the painted pageantry of my vision, the night-wind
blew chill round the grassy slope; the Roman villa and fountain had
gone from the gray shadows where we stood--only the tinkle of the
falling water was left in the darkness, and in front of me still the
tall figure of that gray-clad countryman. Only that countryman! Hoth!
how can I describe the rush of keen wonder and fear which swept over me
when, looking at him again, I saw that he had turned back the flap of
his wide hat, and there, in the dead gray light, was staring at me--the
same stern, passionless face that had come to my shoulder in the reek
and heat of combat on this very spot thirteen hundred years before,
and, doing the bidding of the great Unknown, had drawn me from those
fiery shambles only just in time?
I knew him then, on the instant, as no mortal, and glared, and glared
at him with every nerve at tension, and speechless tongue, too numb to
question, and while I stared like that with the strong emotion playing
on lip and eye--it was only a minute or so, though it seemed an epoch,
the face of that being was lit by a smile, sedate and impalpable.
Then, turning to me with gentle superiority, he said: “You have
been long, Phœnician! They told me you would come again, and I have
waited--waited for you here these few hundred years--waited until
I near tired of watching all your circling vagaries. Here is the
place you came to-night to find--my errand ends! Dig, wonder, and
reflect--this I was told to show you and to say!” And like the echo of
his own words, like the shadow of a cloud upon a rock, that strange
messenger of another life was drunk up by the darkness right in front
of my wondering eyes.
So swift and silent was his passage back into the outer vagueness that
for a minute I could not believe he had gone in truth, and held my
breath, and stared up and down, expecting he would fashion again out
of the draughty air, or speak above or below, once more, in that voice
every syllable of which fell clear on my soul, like water falling into
a well. But it was useless to listen and peer into the gloom. The shape
was gone beyond recall; and, while my mind still pondered over the
strangeness of it, keeping me spellbound at the brink of that enchanted
fountain, with bent head and folded arms, trying to guess how much of
this was fantasy, and how much fact, there rose a shout upon the still
night air, and, raising my eyes, there was Faulkener’s quaint black
image capering wildly on the dusky skyline, the while he brandished
aloft in one hand a spade, and in the other--looking quaintly like a
new-severed head dangling by the hair--the first sod he had cut of that
“treasure-heap” so dear and dreadful to me.
I went sullenly up to the recluse, full of such strange, conflicting
feelings as you may suppose, and found him eager and excited. He had
marked out a long furrow across the crest of the hill, “and this we
were to open and strike out right or left according as our venture
throve.” Jove! I stared for a time at that black trench as though it
were the narrow lip of hell, which presently should yawn and throw
up a grim, ghostly, warlike crew, worse than those who frightened
Jason. And then I laughed in bitterness and perplexity, and tore off
my doublet and rolled my tunic-sleeves above my shoulder, and took a
spade, and at one strong heave plunged it deep into the tender bosom of
the swelling turf just over where the outskirts of the ancient Roman
house had been, and wrenched it up. Then in again, and then again,
while the mad philosopher capered in the twilight to watch my sinewy
strength so well applied, and the whistling bats swept curious round
us. I had not turned back a stitch of that light, peaty coverlet,
when down my spade sank through an inner crust, deep into something
soft and hollow-seeming; and the next minute Faulkener, who also had
set to work, was into the same fine strata too. We laid it bare, and
there below us shone a floor of white dim ashes, mixed with earth, and
leaves, and roots.
“A torch! a torch!” yelled Faulkener, and down he went upon his knees,
and, wild with exultation, wallowed in that powdery stuff, throwing it
out by hand and armfuls, till all his clothes were covered with it,
and his hoary beard was still more hoary, and his white face still
more white, and his mad twinkling eyes were still more lunatic, and
I helping him, full of crowding hopes and fears. And so we dug and
groveled and scraped, while the pale stars twinkled overhead, until
soon my master gave a shout, and looking quickly at him--Jove! he was
hand in hand with a dead white hand that he had uncovered, and was
hauling at it in frantic eagerness, and scraping away the rubbish
above, and slipping and plunging and staggering in the gray dust, while
the beaded sweat shone on his forehead, and his white elf-locks were
all astray upon the night air; and then--gods!--it began to give, and
I held my breath--knowing all I knew--while the white stuff cracked
and heaved about that ghostly palm, and then it opened, and--first his
head, and then his shoulders, and then his stiff contorted limbs--my
master dragged out into the starshine, with one strong effort, a bulky
ancient warrior!
There, in the torchlight which Faulkener held above him, slept that
kiln-dried soldier. He lay flat upon his back, and, while one knotted,
shriveled fist was stretched stiff in front in deathless anger, the
broken digits of his other hand were welded by red iron rust about the
red rusty hilt of a bladeless sword. And that soldier’s soulless face
was set stiff and hard, while on his stern, shut lips and deep in his
eyeless sockets even now restless passion and quenchless hate seemed
smoldering. About that frail body still clung in melancholy tatters the
shreds and remnants of purple webs and golden tissue. On his shoulders,
sunk into his withered, lifeless flesh, were the moldy straps and
scales of harness and cuirass, and on his head what once had been,
though now it was more like winter wrack, a gay helmet and a horseman’s
nodding crimson plume. It was a ghostly plaything to unearth like that
under the wavering starlight, and it was doubly dreadful to note how
deathlike was it while yet all the hot life-passion lay stamped forever
in unchanging fierceness on the hideous mask of dissolution. I turned
away as Faulkener, gleefully shouting that he was a thousand years old
if he was a day, tore the russet trophies from him, and pushed him
down the hill; I turned away, grimly frowning, out into the black
starlight, with folded arms, for that contorted thing was jolly Caius
Martius, my merry Byzantine captain of those mercenaries who stood it
out with me that last night of Roman power in England! Jolly Caius
Martius! Often we two had set the British dogs a-yelping as we wandered
home from noisy midnight frolics down the moonlit temple streets; often
we two had driven the same boar to bay deep in his reedy stronghold;
often at banquet and at feast, when the roses lay deep below and the
strong warm breath of scented wine hung thick above, that curly black
head the Mercian damsels liked so well had sunk happy and heavy on
my shoulder. Jove! how the world had spun since then!--and there was
Faulkener pushing him down the slope, and I could not raise a comrade
finger for merry Caius, and could only stupidly remember, as the
sprawling head went trundling away into the brambles, how, in that long
ago, I had owed him half a silver talent and had never yet repaid it!
Well, we fell to work again, and farther on, amid the passages where
these ancient men had fought and fallen in the rout, we found a limb,
and dug about it till we uncovered another strange, twisted hide of
what was once humanity--a stalwart shell this one, but Faulkener
thought little on him because he wore no links or chains, and set
him rolling after the other with scant ceremony. The next we came to
seemed by gear and weapons a Southern mercenary. He lay asprawl upon
his face, and my master levered him out and plucked him of his scanty
metal relics with no more compunction than if he were a pigeon. It was
grim, wild work, there under the leer of the yellow dawning, all in the
hush of the twilight, coming on those ghastly relics thus one by one,
and prising them out of their ashy shells, and turning them over, and
reading on each black mummy mask, that seemed to smile and grin with
dead ferocity under the flickering flambeau light, the countenance and
fashion of ancient comrade and ally. And ever and anon as I worked,
held to the labor by a strange fascination, the melancholy footfall of
the gusty wind came pacing round the hill, and with a frown and start I
would look over my shoulder, half fearing, half hoping it was my gray
countryman once more. So we toiled, and toiled, while the light waned,
and Faulkener’s treasure-heap was swelling. And the nearer we worked
to the center of that ample round of corridors and courts the thicker
came to light those old world fighters, and presently we got right
down to the tessellated paving of Electra’s lordly hall, and here we
found what it was which made all these ancient warriors so still and
lasting. It was that strange, mysterious fountain. That jet of pungent
taste and wondrous properties, when the walls fell in, had overflowed
its basins and percolated through the deep soft ashes lying thick about
these marble rooms and chambers, and, by the stony magic wherewith it
was charged, had lined and filled those ancient gentlemen it met with,
and thereafter, in long dark months of silence, had supplemented their
wasting tissues with its calcareous sediment, and kept them forever as
we found them--strange, horrible, exact, and real, with passion and
life stamped deep on every face, and strength and vigor in every limb,
although those faces wore only ashy masks, and those limbs no stouter
than the vellum on which I write.
Under the crust of welded stone and ashes it was wonderful to see how
perfectly was everything preserved. We raised it in great flakes from
the stony flooring, and all the stain and litter of the fight lay under
it, as though they were not a dozen hours old; we chipped that scaly
covering from the walls, and there, fresh as the moment they were made,
gleamed up under our wavering torchlight all the gay mural paintings,
the smudges of battle, and the scars of axe and arrow. We lifted that
pale, stiff shroud from the inner chambers, and beneath lay shreds and
shells of furniture and gear; the half-baked loaves were in the oven;
the flesher’s knife was on the block! Round about the bounds of that
stately ruin we went, uncovering at every spadeful something mournful,
forgetting fatigue and time, as wonder after wonder rose to view; thus
we came at last to the mid court, where the great fight had been, and
peeled the thin turf from off it, far and near.
We had scarce begun to rake aside the ashes, when down to help us
came, out of the black parting clouds, strong gusts of cold morning
wind, blowing fitfully at first and chill, and sobbing overhead and
all about us, as though the gray air was full of spirits. It gathered
strength, and, wailing over the wide floor we had uncovered, in one
strong breath swept back the veil of ashes, and there--Jove!--all amid
the juts of fallen masonry and stumps of beam and rafter, blackened in
that fire which seemed but yesterday, were high, protruding knees of
dead combatants, and stiff bent elbows, as thick as grass; and haggard,
wizened faces, all stamped with twenty fine degrees of terror; and
fierce clenched fists, and hands that still waved above them broken
hilt and blade. There they lay in heaps and rucks about that ancient
villa floor, just as they had died fighting amid the red choking ashes
of the blazing roof, all horribly lifelike and yet so grimly dead! Old
Faulkener yelled in sheer affright, and capered, and shook his fists
toward them, and tore his lean white locks ’tween dread and wonder; and
stiff my Phrygian curls seemed on my head, and cold the sweat upon my
forehead.
And then, while we watched, a very wonderful thing happened, and,
dreadful and beautiful, those cinders began to glow. Jutting beam and
rafter grew red and redder, pile and timber and cornice caught the
ambient blush, the crimson stain crept all across the hall, it burned
in mockery upon ruined wall and portico, and lit with an unearthly
radiance those parched, contorted faces that grinned and leered and
frowned, still in frantic struggle with their kind, all round us. Was
I mad? Was this some hideous last delusion which beset my aching mind
and horror-surfeited eyes? No! there was Faulkener saw it too, and had
fallen on his knees and buried his fearful face behind his hands and
thrown his gaberdine cloak over his head to shut out that dreadful
sight. I drew my hand across my face and looked again: it was true,
too true--that charred and ancient villa was all alight once more;
wherever fire had been, at every point and crevice, there the ambient
glow was smoldering with a flameless brightness. It underlay the silver
ashes with a hot golden shine; it gilded all the fallen metal statues
of gods and goddesses until they seemed to shimmer beneath its touch;
it shone near by under the walls and far out upon the steps--it was so
real, so terribly like what it had been here a thousand years before,
that I half bent to take a weapon, in the delusion of that brilliant
fantasy, a husky cry of encouragement to those stark, ancient warriors
half framed itself upon my lips--and then, how exactly I know not, but
somehow a slight insequence fleshed upon me, and in another minute I
had spun angrily round upon my heel--and there I saw, right behind us,
calm, benignant, crimson, the great May sun was topping the eastern
oak-trees.