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.