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.