Spinster of This Parish

by W. B. Maxwell

And certainly, could they have seen her, no old friends of Queen’s Gate or Prince’s Gardens could have helped to recall her to herself. They would not have recognised her. Although she still spoke so gently and smiled so dreamily, she sat her mule with the nonchalant ease of a gaucho; her whole aspect was wild and fierce; the remnants of her stout straw hat, battered out of its original shape, were tied beneath her chin and bound about her neck; her dusty smeared face was almost black, with yellow lines that had been scored by perspiration. She might have been an Indian boy—as Dyke had told her. He said he must hit upon a good man’s name and rechristen her.

Soon after the mid-day halt there came into view the landmark for which he had been watching. With a grunt of satisfaction he pointed it out to her—the white dome of a mountain that had shown itself above the nearer summits. “That’s my guide now.” The sight of it made Dyke pleasurably excited. He talked of his emeralds again. They must push on steadily now and waste no time. He galloped off to tell Manuel that the goal was drawing nearer, and then returned to her.

They rode on—on into silence. That day Emmie was conscious of it, in this manner, for the first time. Yet it must have been with them, one would think, for a long while. The silence seemed to have become a property of space. It could no more be broken by the slight sounds they made—such as the note of the bell, the shuffle of so many iron-shod feet, the shouts of the muleteers, the song of Dyke—than you can break the ice of a frozen lake by throwing a small stone at it. The stone slides across the surface till it comes to rest. She remembered the noise of explosions heard during the early days, when they were still in touch with the fretful ambitious labours of humanity—those engineers on the new railway blasting the rocks that opposed them. Here it was as if the mountains could permit no noises, not even echoes of noises, that they did not themselves create. They commanded a universal hush, in which, after breathless listening pauses, they sucked the roaring wind through their jagged teeth, threw a garment of snow from their shoulders, or with earthquake groans let their sides gape open and a vast new ravine appear in the raw wound. Then one might hear their reverberating voice high in the air and low in the ground. But otherwise all must be still. Silence and solitude—the sense of loneliness undisturbed since the world began grew deeper as the shadows of the hills began to creep across one’s path. It seemed then to be a valley into which man had never been, into which no man should ever go.

But that was an illusion, mere nonsense. As Dyke told her, in the dim past many men had been here. These valleys, all of them running north and south, had formed a great trade route that stretched nearly from one end of the continent to the other. During the dominion of the Incas, perhaps earlier still, perhaps ages and ages ago, before the Pharaohs reigned and pyramids were built in Egypt, this was a busy crowded highway of commerce and government; with troops of soldiers passing and repassing, tax collectors going south, great nobles being carried in gilded litters, priests of the sun, long trains of llamas instead of mules carrying tribute northward from remote provinces or conquered territories. Doubtless, if one dug away the dust of time, or could remove the layers of fallen rocks, one would find traces of the great highway—its buried pavement, the foundation masonry of ruined bridges, fragments of wall that had belonged to rest-houses.

Yes, if all the ghosts of antiquity should appear, they would form a multitude to fill the valley floor from hillside to hillside.

Talking of these things led him naturally to speak once more of the emeralds. Of course, it stood to reason that they mined as far south as this. In those days the mineral wealth of the hills was searched with untiring vigour; there were mines everywhere—for gold, for silver, for the precious stones—above all, one must suppose, for emeralds. The word was on his lips continually. Emeralds!

He was eager to push on, but with all his urging, the march had grown slow and languid. The men seemed tired and stupid; they would not respond to his cheering holloas. They let the mules string out. And two or three times Manuel Balda came and asked him if they might not halt for the night. At last he gave the order.

The night fell swiftly, and it was very dark until the moon rose. Emmie, after lying down, lifted the flap of their tent, and saw the bare ground silvered and the rocky slopes greyly shining, and she felt as if far and near, all round her, to the ends of the earth, there were solitude, silences, mysteries. The sensation—for it was no more—had not the smallest importance to her mind. She was very happy, supremely contented.

She looked at the tiny camp-fire, dying down now, to red embers, so that the group of men who were crouched upon the ground about it showed in the pale moonlight with no glow of flame upon their faces. Dyke was standing by them, still talking to them. It was a lengthy jollying to-night.

There stood her man. She had got him now, for her very own. These hired followers did not count; he and she were alone now, with no human being to come between them. They had travelled far in their great love—away from etiquette books, beyond the reach of laws—backward through the ages to forgotten codes and outworn ceremonies—back, almost, to the elements of life and the rule of nature. She was half dreaming; and she thought, as she dropped her curtain and lay down beneath the rugs, that Aconcagua had married them; these mountains had confirmed the bond, making them one under the cold stars, mingling their limbs by the pressure of iron frosts, moulding their embrace to the uneven surface of their bed of stone; and now the shadowy stately ghosts of the Incas had gathered round the nuptial tent, to put a mystic seal upon their union.