A STRANGE STORY.

BY THE AUTHOR OF "MY NOVEL," "RIENZI," &c.

CHAPTER LXXXI.

MARGRAVE now entered the litter, and the
Veiled Woman drew the black curtains round
him. I walked on, as the guide, some yards in
advance. The air was still, heavy, and parched
with the breath of the Australasian sirocco.

We passed through the meadow-lands, studded
with slumbering flocks; we followed the branch
of the creek, which was linked to its source in
the mountains by many a trickling waterfall;
we threaded the gloom of stunted, misshapen
trees, gnarled with the stringy bark which
makes one of the signs of the strata that
nourish gold; and at length the moon, now in
all her pomp of light, mid-heaven amongst her
subject stars, gleamed through the fissures of
the cave, on whose floor lay the relics of
antediluvian races, and rested, in one flood of silvery
splendour, upon the hollows of the extinct volcano,
with tufts of dank herbage, and wide spaces
of paler sward, covering the gold below—Gold,
the dumb symbol of organised Matter's great
mystery, storing in itself, according as Mind, the
informer of Matter, can distinguish its uses, evil
and good, bane and blessing.

Hitherto the Veiled Woman had remained in
the rear with the white-robed skeleton-like
image that had crept to my side unawares with
its noiseless step. Thus, in each winding turn
of the difficult path at which the convoy,
following behind me, came into sight, I had seen
first the two gaily-dressed armed men, next the
black bier-like litter, and last the Black-veiled
Woman and the White-robed Skeleton.

But now, as I halted on the table-land, backed
by the mountain and fronting the valley, the
woman left her companion, passed by the litter
and the armed men, and paused by my side, at
the mouth of the moonlit cavern.

There for a moment she stood, silent; the
procession below mounting upward laboriously and
slow; then she turned to me, and her veil was
withdrawn.

The face on which I gazed was wondrously
beautiful, and severely awful. There, was neither
youth nor age; but beauty mature and majestic as
that of a marble Demeter.

"Do you believe in that which you seek?"
she asked, in her foreign melodious, melancholy
accents.

"I have no belief," was my answer. "True
science has none. True science questions all
things, takes nothing upon credit. It knows
but three states of the mind—Denial, Conviction,
and that vast interval between the two, which is
not belief, but suspense of judgment."

The woman let fall her veil, moved from me,
and seated herself on a crag above that cleft
between mountain and creek, to which, when I
had first discovered the gold that the land
nourished, the rain from the clouds had given
the rushing life of the cataract, but which now,
in the drought and the hush of the skies, was
but a dead pile of stones.

The litter now ascended the height; its bearers
halted; a lean hand tore the curtains aside, and
Margrave descended, leaning, this time, not on
the Black-veiled Woman but on the White-robed
Skeleton.

There, as he stood, the moon shone full on his
wasted form; on his face, resolute, cheerful, and
proud, despite its hollowed outlines and sicklied
hues. He raised his head, spoke in the language
unknown to me, and the armed men and
the litter-bearers grouped round him, bending
low, their eyes fixed on the ground. The Veiled
Woman rose slowly and came to his side,
motioning away, with a rnute sign, the ghastly
form on which he leant, and passing round him
silently, instead, her own sustaining arm.
Margrave spoke again, a few sentences, of which I
could not even guess the meaning. When he had
concluded, the armed men and the litter-bearers
came nearer to his feet, knelt down, and kissed
his hand. They then rose, and took from the
bier-like vehicle the coffer aud the fuel. This
done, they lifted again the litter, and again,
preceded by the armed men, the procession
descended down the sloping hill-side, down into
the valley below.

Margrave now whispered, for some moments,
into the ear of the hideous creature who had made
way for the Veiled Woman. The grim skeleton
bowed his head submissively, and strode noiselessly
away through the long grasses; the slender
stems, trampled under his stealthy feet, relifting
themselves, as after a passing wind. And thus he,
too, sank out of sight down into the valley below.
On the table-land of the hill remained only we
three—Margrave, myself, and the Veiled Woman.