“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!