第27章

"The nurse born in Asia is but wise through her love; the pale son of Europe is wise through his art.The nurse says, 'Forbear!' Do you say, 'Adventure'?""Peace!" exclaimed Margrave, stamping his foot on the ground."Itake no counsel from either; it is for me to resolve, for you to obey, and for him to aid.Night is come, and we waste it; move on."The woman made no reply, nor did I.He took my arm and walked back to the hut.The barbaric escort followed.When we reached the door of the building, Margrave said a few words to the woman and to the litter bearers.They entered the hut with us.Margrave pointed out to the woman his coffer, to the men the fuel stowed in the outhouse.Both were borne away and placed within the litter.

Meanwhile I took from the table, on which it was carelessly thrown, the light hatchet that I habitually carried with me in my rambles.

"Do you think that you need that idle weapon?" said Margrave."Do you fear the good faith of my swarthy attendants?""Nay, take the hatchet yourself; its use is to sever the gold from the quartz in which we may find it imbedded, or to clear, as this shovel, which will also be needed, from the slight soil above it, the ore that the mine in the mountain flings forth, as the sea casts its waifs on the sands.""Give me your hand, fellow laborer!" said Margrave, joyfully."Ah, there is no faltering terror in this pulse! I was not mistaken in the man.What rests, but the place and the hour?--I shall live, Ishall live!"

I

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 among 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 splendor 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, skeletonlike 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, bierlike 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 Ihad 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 bierlike 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 colors, some among 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."