CHAPTER III
I do confess I can offer no justification for the continuation of my story. Once so fairly sped as I was on that long-distant day, thus recalled in such detail as I can remember, the natural and regular thing would be that there should be an end of me, with, perhaps, a page or two added by some kindly scribe to recall my too quickly smothered virtues. Nevertheless, I write again, not a whit the worse for a mischance which would have silenced many a man, and in a mood to tell you of things wonderful enough to strain the sides of your shallow modern skepticism, as new wine stretches a goat-skin bottle.
All the period between my death on the Druid altar and my reawakening was a void, whereof I can say but little. The only facts pointing to a faint clue to the wonderful lapse of life are the brief phenomena of my reawakening, which came to hand in sequence as they are here set down.
My first consciousness was little better than a realization of the fact that practically I was extinct. To this pointless knowledge there came a dawning struggle with the powers of mortality, until very slowly, inch by inch, the negativeness was driven back, and the spark of life began to brighten within me. To this moment I cannot say how long the process took. It may have been days, or weeks, or months, or ages, as likely as not; but when the vital flame was kindled the life and self-possession spread more quickly, until at last, with little fluttering breaths like a new-born baby’s, and a tingling trickle of warm blood down my shrunken veins, in one strange minute, four hundred years after the close of my last spell of living (as I afterward learned), I feebly opened my eyes, and recognized with dull contentment that I was alive again.
But, oh! the sorrows attendant on it! Every bone and muscle in me ached to that awakening, and my very fiber shook to the stress of the making tide of vitality. You who have lain upon an arm for a sleepy hour or two, and suffered as a result ingenious torments from the new-moving blood, think of the like sorrows of four hundred years’ stagnation! It was scarcely to be borne, and yet, like many other things of which the like might be said, I bore it in bitterness of spirit, until life had trickled into all the unfamiliar pathways of my clay, and then at length the pain decreased, and I could think and move.
In that strange and lonely hour of temporal resurrection almost complete darkness surrounded me, and my mind (with one certain consciousness that I had been very long where I lay) was a chaos of speculation and fancy and long-forgotten scenes. But as my faculties came more completely under control, and my eyes accepted the dim twilight as sufficient and convenient to them, they made out overhead a dull, massy roof of rock, rough with the strong masonry of mother earth, and descending in rugged sides to an uneven floor. In fact, there could be no doubt I was underground, but how far down, and where, and why, could not be said. All around me were cavernous hollows and midnight shadows, round which the weird gleam of rude pillars and irregular walls made a heavy, mysterious coast to a black, uncertain sea. I sat up and rubbed my eyes—and as I did so I felt every rag of clothing drop in dust and shreds from my person—and peered into the almost impenetrable gloom. My outstretched hands on one side touched the rough rocks of what was apparently the arch of a niche in this chamber of the nether world, and under me they discovered a sandy shelf, upon which I lay, some eight or ten feet from the ground, as near as could be judged. Not a sound broke the stillness but the gentle monotony of falling water, whereof one unseen drop, twice a minute, fell with a faint silver cadence on to the surface of an unknown pool. I did not fear, I was not frightened, and soon I noticed as a set-off to the gloom of my sullen surroundings the marvelous purity of the atmosphere. It was a preservative itself. Such an ambient, limpid element could surely have existed nowhere else. It was soft as velvet in its absolute stillness, and pure beyond suspicion. It was like some thin, sunless vintage that had mellowed, endless years, in the great vat of the earth, and it now ran with the effect of a delicate tonic through my inert frame. Nor was its sister and ally—the temperature—less conducive to my cure. In that subterranean place summer and winter were alike unknown. The trivial changes that vex the cuticle of the world were here reduced to an unalterable average of gentle warmth that assimilated with the soulless air to my huge contentment. You cannot wonder, therefore, that I throve apace, and explored with increasing strength the limits of my strange imprisonment.
All about me was fine, deep dust, and shreds, which even then smelt in my palm like remnants of fur and skins. At my elbow was a shallow British eating-dish, with a little dust at the bottom, and by it a broken earthenware pitcher such as they used for wine. On my other side, as I felt with inquisitive fingers, lay a handleless sword, one of my own, I knew, but thin with age, the point all gone, rusty and useless. By it, again, reposed a small jar, heavy to lift, and rattling suggestively when shaken. My two fingers, thrust into the neck, told me it was full of coins, and I could not but feel a flush of gratitude in that grim place at the abortive kindness which had put food and drink, weapons and money, by my side, with a sweet ignorance, yet certainty, of my future awakening.
But now budding curiosity suggested wider search, and, rising with difficulty, I cautiously dropped from my lofty shelf on to the ground. Then a wish to gain the outer air took possession of me, and, peering this way and that, a tiny point of light far away on the right attracted my attention. On approaching, it turned out to be a small hole in the cave, out of reach overhead; but, feeling about below this little star of comfort, the walls appeared soft and peaty to the touch, so at once I was at work digging hard, with a pointed stone; and the farther I went the more leafy and rough became the material, while hope sent my heart thumping against my ribs in tune to my labor.
At last, impulsive, after half an hour’s work, a fancy seized me that I could heave a way out with my shoulder. No sooner said than done. I took ten steps back, and then plunged fiercely in the darkness of the great cavern into the moldy screen.
How can I describe the result! It gave way, and I shot, in a whirlwind of dust, into a sparkling, golden world! I rolled over and over down a spangled firmament, clutching in my bewilderment, my hands full of blue and yellow gems at every turn, and slipping and plunging, with a sirocco of color—red, green, sapphire, and gold—flying round before my bewildered face. I finally came to a stop, and sat up. You will not wonder that I glared round me, when I say I was seated at the foot of all the new marvels of a beautiful limestone knoll, clothed from top to bottom with bluebells and primroses, spangled with the young spring greenery of hazel and beech overhead, and backed by the cloudless blue of an April sky!