“What! those shining stones!”
“Are pure gold—treasures which God has hidden during centuries.”
“My God!” exclaimed Pepé.
And with ardent eyes fixed upon the mass of riches before him, the ex-carabinier fell upon his knees. Passions long kept under seemed to rush back into his heart; a complete transformation took place in him, and the sinister expression of his face recalled to mind the hour of crime, when twenty years before he had bargained for the price of blood.
“Now,” said Fabian, looking sadly at the gold, as he thought that all these riches were not worth to him a smile or look from her who had disdained him, “I understand how these two rivers, in their annual rise, and by their torrents that descend from the Misty Mountains, covering this narrow valley, bring down gold with them; the position of this valley is perhaps unique in all the world.”
But the Spaniard heard him not. Riches—which the rough lesson he had received, and the life of independence and the savage happiness he had enjoyed, had taught him during the last ten years to disdain—suddenly resumed their terrible influence over his soul.
“You could not have imagined, could you, Pepé?” continued Fabian, “that so much gold could be collected in one place? I, who have been so long a gold-seeker, could not have imagined it, even after all I had heard.”
Pepé did not reply; his eye wandered eagerly over the blocks of gold, and cast a strange glance on Fabian and on Bois-Rose. The hitter, standing in his favourite attitude, his arm resting on his rifle, amidst all these treasures, looked only at what was dearest to him—the young man restored to him by heaven. Pepé had before him, on one side, his old companion in danger—in a hundred different battles they had uttered their war-cry together, like those brothers in arms in ancient chivalric times, who fought always under the same banner—who shared cold, hunger, and thirst together.
On the other side, the young man, partly orphaned by his crime—a crime which had occasioned him remorse through so many years—the love and sole thought of his only friend in the world; and the demon of cupidity at his heart effaced all these souvenirs, and he already began to think—
A shudder passed through his frame as strange thoughts crossed his mind. A struggle took place within him, a struggle of the feelings of youth with the more noble ones developed by the life of nature, where man seems brought near to God; but this struggle was short: the old outlaw disappeared, and there remained only the man purified by repentance and solitude. Still kneeling on the ground, Pepé had closed his eyes, and a furtive tear, unperceived by his companions, stole from his eyes, and rolled down his bronzed cheeks.