“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?”