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Page 71
Her last words had goaded Balder past bearing. As she turned away, his
face looked grim and forlorn. He balanced with half-raised arms on the
cliff's brink. The river slumbered bluely on below, peace was aloft in
the sky, and joy in the trees and grass. But in the man were darkness
and despair and loathing of his God-given life!
The thing he meditated was not to be, however. Close in shore a little
boat glided into view, beating up against stream. In the stern, the
sheet in one hand and the tiller in the other, sat Balder's old friend
Charon. He nodded up at the young man with a recognizing grin. Then he
laid his tiller-hand aside his brown cheek and sang out,--
"Look out there, Capt'n! Davy Jones's got back,--run foul of you!"
The next moment he put down the helm and ran out.
Meantime Balder, coloring from shame, had stepped back from his
dangerous position; and the peril was past. But the paltering
irresolution which he had at all points displayed urged him to redeem
himself,--else was he lower than a criminal. He went towards
Gnulemah,--knelt down,--caught her dress,--he knew not what he did! In
a blind dance of sentences he told her that he was a murderer, that
all he had said pointed at himself, that with his own hands he had
killed Hiero, whose body now lay at the bottom of the sea; many
frantic words he spoke. Thus, without art or rhetoric, roughly dragged
forth by head and ears, came his momentous confession into the world.
Gnulemah had more than once striven to check it, but in vain. When he
had come to an end, and stood tense and quivering as a bowstring whose
arrow has just flown, these words reached him:--
"Hiero is not dead; he is there behind the trees."
Stiffly he turned and stared bewildered. Landscape, sky, Gnulemah,
swam before his eyes in fragments, like images in troubled water. She
put out her arm and tenderly supported him.
"Where?" said he at length.
"Near the house,--there!" she pointed.
Balder began to walk forward doubtfully. But, suddenly realizing what
lay before him, clearness and vigor ebbed back. He saw a figure turn
the corner of the house. Then he leapt out and ran like a stag-hound!
XXIV.
UNCLE HIERO AT LAST.
In a couple of minutes Balder was at the house, breathless: the figure
was nowhere to be seen. He sprang across the broad portico, and
hurried with sounding feet through the oaken hall. Should he go up
stairs, or on to the conservatory? The sound of a softly shutting door
from the latter direction decided him. The place looked as when he
left it a half-hour before. Gnulemah's curtain had not been moved. The
other door was closed; he ran up the steps between the granite
sphinxes, and found it locked. Butting his shoulder against the panel
with impatient force, the hinges broke from their rotten fastenings,
and the door gave inwards. Balder stepped past it, and found himself
in the sombre lamp-lit interior of the temple.
He could discern but little; the place seemed vast; the corners were
veiled in profound shadow. At the farther end a huge lamp was
suspended, by a chain from the roof, over a triangular altar of black
marble. The architecture of the room was strange and massive as of
Egyptian temples. Strong, dark colors met the eye on all sides; in the
panels of the walls and distant ceiling fantastic devices showed
obscurely forth. Nine mighty columns, of design like those in the
doorway, were ranged along the walls, their capitals buried in the
upward gloom.
Becoming used to the dusk, Balder now marked an array of colossal
upright forms, alternating between the pillars. Their rough
resemblance to human figures drew him towards one of them: it was an
Egyptian sarcophagus covered with hieroglyphic inscriptions, and
probably holding an immemorial mass of spiced flesh and rags. These
silent relics of a prehistoric past seemed to be the only company
present. In view of his uncle's well-known tastes, the nephew was not
unprepared to meet these gentry.
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