“Who? Why, Alfred. Alfred, the son of Ethelwulf, the son of Egbert—Alfred the great Thane of England!”
“One of your British Princelings, I suppose,” I muttered huskily. “And wherein was he so right?”
“He was right, O marvelous returner from the dim seas of the past, in that he prophesied your return! To him you owe this shelter and preservation.”
“All this may be so, my host,” I replied, beginning to feel more myself again; “but it matters not. I fought a stubborn fight last night, and I was carried away by a midnight torrent. If you have sheltered and dried me, and”—with a sudden sinking of my voice—“if you have protected the little maid I had with me, then I am grateful to you, Alfred or no Alfred,” and I threw off a mountain of moldy-seeming rags and coverlets, and staggered up.
But that worthy monk was absolutely dumb with astonishment, and as I tottered to my feet, holding out to him a gaunt, trembling hand, brown with the dust of ages, and drunkenly reeled across his floor, he edged away, while the long hair of his silvery head bristled with wonder.
“My son, my son!” he gasped at length, over the shining crucifix; “this is not so; none of us know the beginning of that sleep you have slept; that night of yours is of immeasurable antiquity. History has forgotten your very battles, and your maid, I fear, has long since passed into common, immaterial dust.”
This was too much, and suddenly, overwhelmed by the tide of hot Phœnician passion, I shook my fist in his face, and swearing in my bitter Roman that he lied, that he was a grizzle-bearded villain with a heart as black as his tongue, I staggered to the doorway, and pushing wide the hinges tottered out on to a grassy promontory just as the primrose flush of day was breaking over the hilltops. There, holding on to a post, for my legs were very weak and frail, and peering into the purple shadows, I lifted my voice in anger and fear, and shouted in that green loneliness, “Numidea! Numidea!” then waited with a beating, beating heart until—thin, sullen, derisive—from the hills across the ravine came back the soulless response:
“Numidea! Numidea!”
I could not believe it. I would not think they could not hear, and stamping in my impatience, “Electra!” I shouted, “Numidea! ’tis Phra—Phra the friendless who calls to you!” then again bent an ear to listen, until, from the void shadows of the purple hills, through the pale vapors of the morning mist, there came again in melancholy-wise the answer:
“’Tis Phra, Phra the friendless who calls to you!”—and I dropped my face into my hands and bent my head and dimly knew then that I was jettisoned once more on the shore of some unknown and distant time!