“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.