“She knows as much as you know little. Look!” and the shadow spread out one violet hand over that silent face.
I looked, and then leaped back with a cry of fear and surprise. The dead girl was truly dead, not a muscle or a finger moved, yet, as at that bidding, I turned my eyes upon her there under the tender glowing shadow of that wondrous palm, a faint flush of colorless light rose up within her face, and on it I read, for one fleeting moment, such inexplicable knowledge, such extraordinary felicity, such impenetrable contentment, that I stood spellbound, all of a tremble, while that wondrous radiance died away even quicker than it had risen. Gods! ’twas like the shine of the herald dawn on a summer morning, it was like the flush on the water of a coming sunrise—I drew my hand across my face and looked up, expecting the chieftainess would have gone, but she was still there.
“Are you satisfied for the moment, dear trader, or would you catechize me as you did just now yonder by the fire under the altar in the circle?”
“Just now!” I exclaimed, as her words swept back to me the remembrance of the stormy night in the old Saxon days when, with the fair Editha asleep at my knee, that shade had appeared before—“just now! Why, Shadow, that was three hundred years ago!”
“Three hundred what?”
“Three hundred years—full round circles, three hundred varying seasons. Why, Blodwen, forests have been seeded, and grown venerable, and decayed about those stones since we were there!”
“Well, maybe they have. I now remember that interval you call a year, and what strange store we set by it, and I dimly recollect,” said the dreamy spirit, “what wide-asunder episodes those were between the green flush of your forests and the yellow. But now—why, the grains of sand here on thy tent-floor are not set more close together—do not seem more one simple whole to you, than your trivial seasons do to me. Ah! dear merchant, and as you smile to see the ripples of the sea sparkle a moment in frolic chase of one another, and then be gone into the void from whence they came, so do we lie and watch thy petty years shine for a moment on the smooth bosom of the immense.”
Deep, strange, and weird seemed her words to me that night, and much she said more than I have told I could not understand, but sat with bent head and crossed arms full of strange perplexity of feeling, now glancing at the dead soldier-maid my body loved, and then looking at that comely column of blue woman-vapor, that sat so placid on the foot of the bier and spoke so simply of such wondrous things.
For an hour we talked, and then on a sudden Blodwen started to her feet and stood in listening attitude. “They are coming, Phœnician,” she cried, and pointed to the door.
I arose with a strange, uneasy feeling and looked out. The gray dawn had spread from sky to sky, and an angry flush was over all the air. The morning wind blew cold and melancholy, and the shrouded mists, like bands of pale specters, were trooping up the bloody valley before it, but otherwise not a soul was moving, not a sound broke the ghostly stillness. I dropped the awning, and shook my head at the fair priestess, whereon she smiled superior, as one might at a wayward child, and for a minute or two we spoke again together. Then up she got once more, tall and stately, with dilated nostrils and the old proud, expectant look I had seen on her sweet red face so often as we together, hand in hand, and heart to heart, had galloped out to tribal war. “They come, Phœnician, and I must go,” she whispered, and again she pointed to the tent-door, though never a sound or footfall broke the stillness.