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THE ROMANCE OF THE 
 FOUNTAIN 
 
New Six Shilling- Novels 
 
 Crown 8vo., cloth 
 
 The Interpreters. By Margaretta 
 Byrde. 
 
 Stars ;of Destiny. By L. Parry 
 Truscott. 
 
 The Threshing Floor. By J. S. Fletcher. 
 
 The House by the River. By Florence 
 Warden. 
 
 The Progress of Priscilla. By LuCAS 
 
 Cleeve. 
 
 The Yarn of Old Harbour Town. By 
 W. Cl.\rk Russell. 
 
 London: T. FISHER UNWIN 
 
THE ROMANCE OF 
 THE FOUNTAIN 
 
 BY 
 
 EUGENE LEE-HAMILTON 
 
 AUTHOR OF "sonnets OF THE WINGLESS HOURS" 
 "the lord of the dark red STAR," ETC, ETC. 
 
 Cf>'/iVi/ 
 
 LONDON 
 T. FISHER UNWIN 
 
 PATERNOSTER SQUARE 
 MCMV 
 
• • ' . • » « 
 
 • •• • «. 
 « ' f » t ' 
 
 [^// ^/^>4/j reserved. ] 
 
I DEDICATE THIS BOOK 
 
 TO ALL, WHETHER YOUNG OR OLD, WHO FEEL THE 
 
 SPELL OF THE MOST ROMANTIC EPISODE OF THE 
 
 WORLD'S MOST ROMANTIC MOMENT; 
 
 WHEN MEN, IN PURSUIT OF THE UNREAL, 
 
 CONQUERED FOR OUR LATER AGES 
 
 EVER-REAL TREASURIES 
 
 OF FANCY. 
 
 1^ <> 
 
 4-3707'^ 
 
 r^ <-> 
 
 i 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Cha] 
 I. 
 
 GATHERING OF CLUES 
 
 > • a 
 
 Page 
 1 
 
 II. 
 
 INDIAN BEADS . 
 
 
 22 
 
 III. 
 
 HEREDITARY FOES 
 
 
 36 
 
 IV. 
 
 PREPARATIONS . 
 
 
 45 
 
 V. 
 
 A ROYAL AUDIENCE 
 
 
 53 
 
 VI. 
 
 THE START 
 
 
 67 
 
 vn. 
 
 IN HISPANIOLA. 
 
 
 74 
 
 vin. 
 
 BECALMED 
 
 
 84 
 
 IX. 
 
 MOON-SHADOWS 
 
 
 91 
 
 X. 
 
 SHIP'S TALK 
 
 
 99 
 
 XI. 
 
 THE WATER IN THE TANKS . 
 
 . 108 
 
 XTI. 
 
 THE FLOWER . 
 
 • • 
 
 . 120 
 
 XQI. 
 
 THE LANDING OF THE WHITES 
 
 . 125 
 
 XIV. 
 
 SUSPENSE 
 
 • • 
 
 . 132 
 
 XV. 
 
 THE MEN IN THE BOATS 
 
 . 139 
 
 XVI. 
 
 RENDEZVOUS IN THE 
 
 FOREST 
 
 . 144 
 
 xvn. 
 
 MEETING OF FOES 
 
 • • 
 
 . 156 
 
 xvin. 
 
 THE WOT,F IN THE FLEECE . 
 
 . 166 
 
 
 
 vij 
 
 
Contents 
 
 Oliap. > 
 
 XIX. THE PORTENT . 
 
 XX. IN THE SPANISH CAMP 
 
 XXI. SILENT PERIL . 
 
 XXn. THE AMBASSADORS 
 
 XXIII. MAGIC .... 
 
 XXIV. THE FIGHT ROUND THE LITTER 
 XXV. IN THE ROCK TEMPLE 
 
 XXVI. THE DUNGEON . 
 XXVII. BY THE MAGIC BRINK 
 
 Page 
 
 174 
 
 188 
 203 
 208 
 222 
 234 
 241 
 248 
 262 
 
 viu 
 
',' . 
 
 
 THE ROMANCE OF THE FOUNTAIN 
 
 -o- 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 GATHERING OF CLUES 
 
 Nearly a generation had elapsed since the 
 adventurous spirits of Spain had begun their 
 wild chase of the setting sun. They might 
 indeed almost be said to have caught up the 
 great round orb in Hispaniola. And yet but 
 a very small part of those phantom islands 
 which for centuries had loomed in the golden 
 light of the western horizon only to vanish in 
 mist and night, had so far been added to the 
 Spanish possessions. No one yet suspected the 
 existence of the treasuries of gold that were 
 about to be opened up by Cortes and Pizarro. 
 But still a vague wistful wonder was turning 
 all men's eyes to the West. It was the time 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 when every hungry scholar, shivering in his 
 tattered cloak in the shadow of some Spanish 
 University, might be thinking of selling his 
 books to buy himself a sword ; and when the 
 beggar in the square might be dreaming of 
 printing his bare feet in sands of gold ; nay, 
 might perhaps be potentially the lord of yet 
 undiscovered realms. 
 
 But gold and precious stones, dominion and 
 slaves, were not the only things that men 
 panted for as they looked wistfully westw^ards, 
 and followed the setting sun on its w-ay. There 
 were other and less material prizes, stranger 
 and more dazzling goals, in the unknown lands 
 of the Evening, that appealed to the wild 
 imagination of men, to the eternal thirst of 
 the spirit. 
 
 In an old turreted manor-house of Andalusia, 
 among the astrological instruments and alche- 
 mistic crucibles which filled his study, a 
 dreamy-looking man, somewhat past middle- 
 age, and wearing a dark acid-stained dressing- 
 gown had just ceased his monotonous walk 
 
 2 
 
Gathering of Clues 
 
 up and down, and stood at the open casement, 
 looking in such wistful surmise at the sun as 
 it rolled towards the West. For there, where 
 that sun would be when night would be lying 
 thickly and heavily here upon Spain, something 
 told him that what he sought for from year 
 to year with ever wilder desire perhaps lay 
 hid. 
 
 Only when the sun had dipped and dis- 
 appeared below the horizon, did he brush back 
 the grizzling hair from his forehead, close the 
 window and resume his walk up and down, 
 reviewing the life that lay behind him. Had 
 twenty years of effort to distil the Great 
 Elixir only served to bring him to the brink 
 of age, to strew the first thin snows upon his 
 forehead, and leave him in the grasp of 
 despair ? Had he not toiled in his solitary 
 workshop by Saturn's cold blear eye, and then 
 as vainly under the blood-red eye of Mars ? 
 Had he not tried, at the peril of his life, to 
 concoct it with the venom of the asp, to make 
 it with the spittle of the rabid wolf, or with 
 
The Komance of the Fountain 
 
 the mingled juices of plants so deadly, that 
 had it not been for the protection of his thin 
 glass mask, the pestiferous fumes would then 
 and there have turned his red blood black, 
 and thickened it into treacle? ^'0 Youth, 
 Youth," he cried, " what sacrifices have I left 
 unoffered to make thee mine for ever ? " And 
 must he now, in spite of all, behold his strong 
 right hand shake with the palsy, his strong 
 firm foot, which could still climb the steepest 
 hill-side grow vague and shuffling, his smooth 
 skin become a creasy vellum on which the 
 years would have written their miserable cares ? 
 Must this keen eye, still as piercing as the 
 hawk's, become a cloudy lens, through which 
 the shapes which he saw so distinct, w^ould 
 be as pale as the dim memories that would 
 pass like ghosts across his frozen heart ? 
 rosy Youth, wearer of the swift sandals of the 
 Dawn, such could not be the end of the fiercest 
 of thy votaries ! 
 
 He stopped in his walk, and a lighting smile 
 dissipated the frown that had darkened his face. 
 
 4 
 
Gathering of Clues 
 
 Ah, but the Great Elixir was not the only 
 means of stemming age. Was there not also 
 that ineffable Fountain, that bubbling, rippling 
 Diamond of which men had drunk in magic 
 dreams, one draught of which could make the 
 mask of wrinkles drop off for ever ? And had 
 any man a doubt that it existed on one spot 
 or other of the world ? 
 
 But whither turn our steps? The two or 
 three who had reached it in the course of 
 centuries, had locked the glorious secret in their 
 bosom, or had left only dark and closely- 
 guarded hints respecting its whereabouts. 
 
 And yet there was one who spoke very 
 clearly — the great Astralphus. He would take 
 down the book and re-read the passage. 
 
 It was a huge parchment-bound folio with 
 metal clasps. He laid it on the high reading- 
 desk near the window, and by the slowly-fading 
 after-glow of the sunset, followed the crabbed 
 Gothic letters with his finger, line by line. 
 
 " The Fountain stands in the middle of the 
 Wood of Ancients," he read, muttering the 
 
 5 
 
The Romance of the Foimtain 
 
 words as he went on, **a pale and very perilous 
 enchanted forest, all of gnarled and leafless 
 trees, grey wrinkled trunks, which once were 
 men and women. In it are gathered all those 
 within whose hearts the spark of Youth died 
 out wholly before they died themselves. Their 
 feet are twisted roots. Their bony fingers are 
 warped and knotted twigs. Their frozen tears 
 are now dry glassy gums in crooked trickles ; 
 while their beard and hair are grey tufted 
 mosses, floating and fluttering in the wind, 
 which tries to awake them with vague 
 prophecies. And if you place your ear against 
 one of the trunks, you can hear the faint 
 monotonous ticking heart within, which never 
 quickens, never slackens. The gnarled old 
 trees utter no sound, unless you prick the 
 trunk with the point of your sword ; and then 
 they give a faint dull moan. The forest is 
 wrapped in eternal twilight." 
 
 The reader stopped. 
 
 ^* Can anything be more precise ? " he asked, 
 as if appealing to some invisible companion. 
 
 6 
 
Gathering of Clues 
 
 " He writes like one who has surely been there. 
 And here again, where he describes the dangers 
 of the journey :"— And once more his fore- 
 finger followed the crabbed Gothic lines. 
 
 "The Wood of Ancients is beset with a 
 thousand perils; and is full of dreadful enchant- 
 ments. They say that should he who has to 
 cross it cease to look ahead; or should he let 
 cold and numbness grasp him in a lethargy; 
 or should he stop, if only for an instant, doubt- 
 ing of Youth and of his goal, his feet at once 
 take root, his stiffened arms turn into branches, 
 and mighty creepers twine at once round his 
 body and bind him down for ever." 
 
 ^•A monstrous fate," he muttered, shaking 
 his head; "but one which I would risk in 
 very blitheness, if only I had the chance. It 
 is not I who would doubt of Youth. Now let 
 us see how the old wizard monk describes the 
 
 water." 
 
 "The Fountain itself, when once the Wood 
 
 has been crossed, gleams in an opal basin in 
 
 the centre of a great labyrinth, bathed in 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 floods of sunshine, and guarded eternally by 
 seven dragons, armoured in scales of solid 
 natural gold, with ruby-studded wings and 
 claws of steel. At night the garden, which 
 is lit by luminous flowers, is filled with in- 
 numerable butterflies of fire. The leaves, 
 which are of thin sheet emerald, never fall 
 from year to year. The fruits are of red 
 eatable gold, with pips and kernels of precious 
 stones." 
 
 He slowly closed the volume, and fastened 
 down the clamps. 
 
 " A tantalising picture," he sighed. " But 
 Astralphus, why torture thus our hopes and 
 our dreams, and then withhold the clue ? Oh, 
 thou art cruel. And thy silence would crush 
 me, if I did not remember that Michael of 
 Ravenna and the Dutchman, as well as Paul 
 of Trebizond, in their commentaries on this 
 very passage, identify thy Garden with that 
 of the Hesperides. If so, the Fountain lies 
 evening- wards and to the West. What if it 
 lay in that new world of islands discovered 
 
 8 
 
Gathering of Clues 
 
 by Columbus? There no search has yet been 
 made. It is a strange thought. Is it a revela- 
 tion ? Oh fool, fool ! Had I not wasted twenty 
 years in seeking the Great Elixir ; had I not 
 grown grey in groping along the interminable 
 galleries of Error, but, instead, sought the 
 glorious Fount of Youth, I might this very 
 day be kneeling beside its dazzling mirror, 
 and be casting a last long look on my whiten- 
 ing hair, about to plunge in its laughing waves 
 of joy ; about to stand transformed in godlike 
 strength and beauty, bathing in Youth. ..." 
 
 At this point, voices at the door interrupted 
 his meditations, and recalled him to more 
 immediate matters. He remembered that he 
 had appointed the hour after sunset for an 
 interview with three representatives of the 
 three Oriental races still tolerated in Spain, 
 with the idea of consulting them on any 
 traditions which their ancient peoples might 
 possess on the subject that engrossed his 
 thoughts. 
 
 " Let them come in," he said to the servant 
 
 9 
 
The Komance of the Fountain 
 
 who, bearing a three-branched silver candle- 
 stick, lighted the visitors into the now fast- 
 darkening room. They were three typical 
 specimens of their respective races — an aged 
 Eabbi, a Moor, and a Gipsy. A very evident 
 terror was in their faces, and they huddled 
 close to each other as they approached, cring- 
 ing and bowing. 
 
 **The magnificent Lord, Don Luis de 
 Medrana, hath sent for us . . ." began Ezdrel, 
 the Jew, uneasily, and acting as spokesman. 
 *' We throw ourselves at the feet of his 
 Magnificence. ..." 
 
 The man so addressed made a reassuring 
 gesture of something like welcome, or at least 
 of protection, more cordial than his visitors 
 were probably accustomed to on the part of 
 a Christian and a person of quality. 
 
 *' Approach," he said, "and fear not. I per- 
 ceive suspicion darting in your eyes ; but you 
 have nothing to fear. If I have summoned you 
 beneath my roof, you need not tremble. It 
 is not to extort either apostasy or treasure, 
 
 10 
 
Gathering of Clues 
 
 but simply for counsel. Dissimilar and hostile 
 as our races are, unlike as we may be in hue 
 and in feature, in thought and in act, in habits 
 and in creed, we have still two things in 
 common — youth and age. The same relentless 
 winter strews cruel frost upon our heads. The 
 same invisible load bends down our backs. 
 The same inexorable law is written year by 
 year upon our brows in ineffaceable wrinkles. 
 We pant with the same unslakable thirst for 
 one same draught of rejuvenescence. I there- 
 fore pray you, if all or any of you should 
 chance to possess, in the traditions belonging 
 to your peoples, a knowledge of the dazzling 
 waters known as the Fount of Youth — one drop 
 of which would for ever make us young — to 
 impart such knowledge to me now." 
 
 A murmur of surprise and reassurance 
 answered Don Luis's words. His visitors looked 
 first at each other, then at him. 
 
 " Speak first, Jew," he said. 
 
 The Rabbi stepped forward with another 
 deep inclination. 
 
 11 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 " My hoary head and beard, most magnificent 
 Sir," he began, " bear cruel witness to the fact 
 that my steps have never approached the Fount 
 you speak of. And my race, which bears three 
 thousand years of wrinkles on its brow, 
 and on whose bent back the cudgels of the 
 world still fall from age to age, might say 
 the same. Many are the waters by which we 
 have sat and wept. Whether or not we shall 
 ever sit down beside that magic spring, I know 
 not, nor can I tell you whither to turn your 
 footsteps to reach its brink. But I can tell 
 you the strange thing which befell our great 
 King Solomon when he yearned towards it. 
 For it is written in the Book of Jashel for all 
 to read." 
 
 *'Ha, did Solomon seek the Fount?" cried 
 Don Luis. " I did not know. Tell all thou 
 knowest. Rabbi ; and mind thou leave out 
 nothing." 
 
 " He was the mightiest King," the Jew 
 proceeded, "between the uttermost corners of 
 the world. All that the breadth and the 
 
 12 
 
Gathering of Clues 
 
 bowels of earth, all that the depth and 
 the surface of the sea could yield, was his. 
 The Genii who obeyed the circles of his royal 
 wizard wand, built for him harems of sandal- 
 wood and gold, with doors of ivory and courts 
 of trellised silver. Countless caravans brought 
 to his gates an endless stream of spikenard and 
 myrrh, the gold of Ophir, the Tyrian purple, 
 the leopard-skins, the peacocks and the pearls 
 of captive peoples. Every warlike tribe famous 
 for its slave-girls, sent him its whitest tribute. 
 And glory he had, and boundless subtle wisdom. 
 But one great gift, one never - replenished 
 treasure, was dwindling day by day. His 
 youth was waning, his beard was whitening, 
 and cold and dearth were settling upon his 
 heart. 
 
 ' * He summoned a great assembly of the 
 Genii. They flocked from the East and the 
 North, from the West and the South, darkening 
 the sky as they flew. But none of them could 
 give him youth. 
 
 " Then Solouion bethought him of a fountaiu 
 
 13 
 
The Komance of the Fountain 
 
 he had heard of long ago, whose waters made 
 men young, and belonging to the queen of 
 seven islands that lay beyond the Pillars of 
 Eternal Storm ; and he resolved to send a ship 
 to crave a single gourdful. And he filled the 
 ship with the costliest presents ; with enormous 
 rubies ; with gem-embrcidered carpets ; with 
 massive sceptres ; with ostrich eggs in golden 
 settings ; with dwarf gazelles whose horns and 
 hoofs were studded with jewels ; with frank- 
 incense in chiselled vases of jasper ; with 
 pictured targes of hammered gold. And fear- 
 ing, in the corners of his prudence, lest any 
 aged mariner should steal the priceless draught 
 of rejuvenescence, he chose a crew of strong 
 adventurous youths with life before them. 
 They were to sail for forty days and forty 
 nights ; and with his eyes fixed upon his 
 whitening beard, and counting the days, 
 Solomon awaited their return. 
 
 " Six months went by, and still nothing was 
 to be seen of the ship. But at last, at 
 last, it loomed upon the far horizon, and 
 
 14 
 
Gathering of Clues 
 
 old and young crowded upon the shore to 
 meet it. But with a wonder that struck all 
 dumb, it was found to contain a crew of 
 wrinkled, tottering, white-haired men, tooth- 
 less, blear of eye, and curved of spine, whose 
 palsied arms scarcely succeeded in pulling the 
 ropes. They were the self-same men who, but 
 half a year before, had left exulting in their 
 beauty and in their strength. They brought 
 no draught of youth ; nay, not one single 
 drop ; but gibbered in their dotage — all save 
 one, less crazy than the rest, who, before he 
 died, imparted to Solomon alone a tale of mad 
 and unwhisperable horror, which the great king 
 locked in his bosom, safe from the children of 
 
 men." 
 
 (( 
 
 I thank thee, Jew," said Don Luis, as the 
 Kabbi ended his story. *' Thy spirit-crazing 
 narrative would have thrown back my soul 
 like a steed upon its haunches, were it not 
 for one thing. Thou said'st that thy seven 
 islands lay beyond the Pillars of Eternal 
 Storm. Those, I opine, can be none other 
 
 15 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 than the Pillars of Hercules. And so thou, 
 
 too, confirming my every clue, dost send me 
 
 to the West." Then turning to Aben Hamet, 
 
 the Moor, he begged him, if there lurked in the 
 
 ancient vellums of his nation, or among its 
 
 dreams and stories, anything bearing upon what 
 
 he sought, to let him have such knowledge. 
 
 "Many a book," answered the Moslem, ''has 
 
 been composed, most lofty Sir, to lighten the 
 
 sleeplessness of caliphs ; and the wonders 
 
 therein contained are not less in number than 
 
 the stars and circling orbs of heaven. For, as 
 
 the Poet saith excellently well : ' The Ocean 
 
 of the Wondrous hath no shores ; and he w^ho 
 
 sails thereon may sail for ever.' Yet one 
 
 most marvellous, one most thrilling volume, 
 
 eclipses all those ever written ; and he who 
 
 hath not read the Yellow Book of Hassan of 
 
 Aleppo, knoweth not the meaning of w^onder. 
 
 In all that deals with magic, with dreams, 
 
 enchantments, philtres, transformations, afreets, 
 
 ghouls, demons, and the world of genii, there 
 
 is no authority on earth that can approach it, 
 
 16 
 
Gathering of Clues 
 
 Know therefore, most lofty Sir, that the ever- 
 dazzling Fount, whose magic waves can wash 
 off human wrinkles, must be sought in the 
 Valley of the Seven Moons." 
 
 " And where lies that ? " asked the Seeker 
 of Youth. 
 
 " Behind the Setting Sun. A thousand 
 leagues to the westward of the West." 
 
 ** Ha, west of west," exclaimed the other. 
 " How all confirms my thought ! But tell me 
 more of thy magic valley." 
 
 **A ring of black and cloud-capped basaltic 
 peaks," said Aben Hamet, " encloses it with 
 eternal rock and chasm, so dreadful and so 
 dizzy, that no wingless creature has ever 
 reached even its lowest ridges, and the birds 
 themselves, scared by the lifeless horror, fly 
 no higher than its middle ledges. Only the 
 shadowy Genii, now and then, soar through 
 the mists on their demon wings and sit on 
 some livid shelf of rock over the intolerable 
 abyss, to rest their load of curse. There is 
 not one gap, however narrow, in the monstrous 
 
 17 B 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 rampart ; and he who would enter the valley 
 must pass along subterranean paths through 
 Nature's very entrails, and interminable caverns 
 filled with ghosts and snakes. In the darkness 
 the snakes wind round the adventurer's feet, 
 or let themselves down from the unseen vault, 
 and grasp him by the throat. And if he is 
 not quick in disentangling his pinioned limbs 
 they will keep him there for ever. The caverns 
 of the ghosts are further on, and less dark. 
 The phantoms start out of the rock, and 
 whisper into his ear secrets so horrible, that 
 few do not go mad as they hear them. And 
 here and there on the ground lies a shapeless 
 shape which might be human. These are the 
 previous adventurers who perished and were 
 petrified by the drippings from the vault 
 above. Then midway along the chain of 
 caverns is the Lake of Tidal Fire, which he 
 who seeks for Youth must cross on a slippery 
 reef of rocks, uncovered only when the fiery 
 tarn is at low ebb. It is a doubtful race 
 between the adventurer and the molten lava, 
 
 18 
 
Gathering of Clues 
 
 which creeps higher and higher in silent fiery 
 waves, lighting up the whole huge cavern with 
 a lurid glare, splendid and terrific. Further 
 on there are many other caverns, each one 
 full of some new crazing horror, and described 
 with the minutest detail in the book of 
 Hassan of Aleppo, but whose names I have 
 forgotten, save two — the cavern called the 
 gallery of the Ever-Dropping Stones, where 
 lumps of rock keep dropping down from the 
 roof to crush the wretch who runs in the 
 dark ; and one that has deep, deep pools all 
 full of sharks who, from the eternal darkness, 
 have lost their eyes, and whom he has to 
 elude as he swims. The last of the caverns 
 opens out into the Valley of Eternal Moon- 
 light. Its seven moons, eternally at the full, 
 cast a sevenfold shadow, and display the 
 Fountain that leapeth for ever towards them 
 in a tank of pearl as if with vain incessant 
 longing, and falleth back in folds of luminous 
 spray into the pearly basin, like the tail of 
 Omar's battle steed." 
 
 19 
 
The Eomance of the Fountain 
 
 ** The caverns thou rememberest are suf- 
 ficiently terrible, even without those thou hast 
 forgotten," remarked Don Luis. ** But does 
 thy Hassan not tell us where to find their 
 entrance ? " 
 
 **Ay, he doth, with the utmost precision," 
 answered the Moor gravely. 
 
 ^' Well ? " 
 
 " Many years have passed since I read it, 
 and the details have become blurred beyond 
 recovery on the tablets of my mind. Hassan's 
 Yellow Book was kept in the Alhambra, and 
 the Christians destroyed it with a thousand 
 other marvels when they took Granada." 
 
 " May the curse of Heaven consume them ! " 
 cried Don Luis, unable to control his vexation. 
 
 "What, do you curse your own?" asked 
 Aben Hamet. 
 
 " Nay, nay," he answered, " I meant the 
 
 Moslem, for not having placed it elsewhere. 
 
 And so thou leavest me no wiser than has 
 
 the Jew. And now let us hear the Gipsy. 
 
 Why, the fellow's gone ! " 
 
 so 
 
Gathering of Clues 
 
 And so indeed it seemed. 
 
 " He was in the room a minute ago," said 
 the Kabbi, " and drinking in the Moor's 
 description as if it had been the Water of 
 Youth itself." 
 
 " And by the Lord," cried the Seeker, *' the 
 rascal has taken my gold chain ! . . ." 
 
 " I miss the jewelled buckle of my girdle," 
 cried Aben Hamet. 
 
 '* Oh, my shekels," cried in his turn the 
 Rabbi. *' I had six doubloons in my purse. 
 ... Oh my sweet little doubloons ! He has 
 taken my little doubloons ! . . ." 
 
 Then, as the three looked at each other in 
 consternation, a voice was heard singing in the 
 garden below : 
 
 "Where the gipsy tinker tinkles 
 On a kettle all of gold, 
 Is the Fount that takes the wrinkles 
 From the forehead of the old." 
 
 They ran to the window, but there was no 
 one to be seen. 
 
 21 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 INDIAN BEADS 
 
 While Don Luis de Medrana was thus engaged 
 by day and by night in his lonely study in an 
 unremitting search for the great abstraction 
 Youth, concrete youth itself might have been 
 seen at its rosiest in a room on the opposite 
 side of the house, in the shape of his own 
 daughter Kosita. 
 
 Her maid Cristina had just entered to wake 
 her and to open her window in the early 
 morning; and the girl, still half asleep, was 
 stretching her arms, as she worked her way 
 out of her interrupted dreams. A smile that 
 had begun in her sleep was still on her lips. 
 
 "Hark," she said. "What's that? The 
 sound has been blending with a dream I have 
 just had. What is it?" 
 
 28 
 
Indian Beads 
 
 " Do you find it so difficult to guess ? " said 
 the maid, with a little laugh. 
 
 Rosita's smile expanded into a little laugh 
 too. 
 
 '* Perhaps I know," she said, '' in the narrow 
 corner where we keep sweet thoughts." 
 
 *' Listen," said Cristina, "the tinkling has 
 begun again. In a moment he'll repeat the 
 song. There, it begins." 
 
 "Open the lattice," said her mistress, "that 
 I may catch the words." 
 
 It was a man's voice, kept down as if 
 from prudence. Its strength and beauty were 
 guessed, rather than actually heard ; and the 
 words, though low, were singularly distinct. 
 
 " Awake ! The steeds of Phoebus 
 Are pawing, maned with light, 
 Behind the cloudy fences 
 
 That part the Day and Night. 
 
 " And Phoebus' self is leaping, 
 
 Flame-sandal' d, on his car, 
 
 To whirl the dust behind him 
 
 Of every scattered star. 
 23 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 " So leaps my love towards thee 
 
 At every break of day, 
 To make thee mine for ever 
 
 And whirl thy soul away. 
 
 " See, see how Heaven's coursers 
 Have sprung with meteor hoofs 
 
 Upon the sleeping cornfields 
 And dreamy cottage roofs. 
 
 " The cloudy heights are conquered, 
 
 The stars are put to rout ; 
 Awake, awake, Rosita, 
 
 The night is trampled out." 
 
 The voice ceased ; but the thrumming of 
 the guitar was still heard. 
 
 " Give me the yellow briar-rose from the 
 vase, that I may throw it," said Kosita. 
 
 The maid took it from the table. 
 
 "In my native province," she said, as she 
 handed it to her mistress, '' we have a saying 
 that when a woman who bears a flower s name, 
 throws a man that flower from a window, she 
 throws her own self with it." 
 
 Kosita jumped out of bed, stole to the window 
 
 24 
 
Indian Beads 
 
 on tiptoe, peeped, and threw the rose down 
 through the lattice. 
 
 *'He has caught it," she cried in a whisper. 
 " If souls can nestle in the petals of a flower," 
 she whispered yet lower to herself, " mine has 
 been thrown in that one, and he has it." 
 
 "Your birthday, madam, opens well," said 
 Cristina. 
 
 " My birthday ? Ah, so it is. But indeed, 
 indeed, I wish it were not. My heart is too 
 heavy for a birthday." 
 
 ''What, in spite of the singer and his 
 song ? " 
 
 "Alas, on account of the singer and his 
 song," said Rosita. " Isn't Juan de Alvareda 
 the son of our bitterest enemy, of one whose 
 name few care even to whisper in my father's 
 presence ? What hope is there of ever getting 
 his consent ? If he were caught. ..." 
 
 " Your father is too busy with his own 
 schemes to interfere with yours," answered 
 the maid. 
 
 "My father's schemes?" said Rosita. "Ay, 
 
 25 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 that is what is casting the ugly cloud and 
 darkening my birthday. He has some project 
 in his mind that bodes us little good ; and 
 every day he drops some hint that fills my 
 heart with alarm. He has now adventurers 
 and seekers from the Indies constantly about 
 him. I loathe the sight of them. One above 
 all — that man Diego Perez — seems to throw 
 an evil shadow on the sunny path ; why, I 
 scarcely know. . . . Perhaps it is the way 
 he stares at me whenever we meet." 
 
 *' I like the man as little as you do," re- 
 turned Cristina ; '* or any other of those 
 westward - sailing knaves. Which dress will 
 you put on for your birthday, the silver 
 cloth with the seed-pearl stomacher, or the 
 puce with the gold pomegranates?" And 
 opening a wardrobe, she held up the dresses 
 in question. 
 
 " I don't care which," Rosita answered. '' It 
 matters little in what silk or satin I clothe my 
 apprehensions. For myself, I would best like 
 my plain frock of every day. . . . But hark ! 
 
 26 
 
Indian Beads 
 
 what noise is that ? What women are talking 
 under the window ? Go and see." 
 Oristina went to the window. 
 '' It's a chorus of reapers, Madam," she said, 
 looking back into the room. ''A band of 
 women and girls from the village. They are 
 bringing a wreath of cornflowers for your birth- 
 day. It's as large as a cart wheel, with blue 
 and red streamers. ..." 
 
 " Go down and give them largess," said her 
 mistress. 
 
 As Cristina left the room the song of the 
 women rose up simple and sweet. Kosita felt 
 her heart tighten, why she knew not. Was 
 it because he and she had first met in the 
 ruddy ripeness of the corn, that day of days? 
 Would she were one of them, she thought, 
 and he a peasant, that she might go and bathe 
 at sunset in the sea of golden grain, free and 
 without fear, waiting for the great slow wave 
 that evening sets in motion through the wheat 
 — the signal of his coming. Oh, how sweet 
 would be the safety of a cottage hearth, how- 
 
 27 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 ever humble, for the years that had to come, 
 instead of this vague future and its terror! 
 How sweet to meet in an open, fearless love, 
 and not, as now, with danger and with intrigue, 
 when every meeting was perhaps but a parting 
 — a parting, and for ever ! Her brow would 
 be less white than it was ; the blue veins 
 would be tanned away on her sunburnt arm ; 
 but Juan and the future would both be 
 hers. 
 
 Her thoughts were interrupted by a slow 
 and measured step creaking along the gallery 
 outside. She knew it to be her father's. 
 
 He had on the long brownish dressing-gown 
 that he was wont to wear in his alchemist's 
 study. His peaked beard was streaked with 
 grey. His eyes had the rather vacant and 
 distant look of the habitual dreamer and 
 mystic. But, as they rested on his daughter, 
 they seemed to return to earth, and they shone 
 with a kindly light. 
 
 " Didst thou think that to-day of all days 
 I would omit to kiss this sweet young face of 
 
 28 
 
Indian Beads 
 
 thine ? " he said, as she held it up to him. 
 " It is the fairest thing thy father's eyes can 
 rest on, till they rest on the radiant brow of 
 Youth that has no end." 
 
 He brought out a small leather case. 
 
 *' See here, Kosita," he said as he opened it. 
 " I bring thee something dainty for thy birth- 
 day — a necklace of unfamiliar beads made by 
 the Indians in far Hispaniola, each bead unlike 
 the others." 
 
 But her face fell. 
 
 " What, not pleased ? I thought the gift 
 would have made thee dance for joy." 
 
 " I wish it came from any other place," she 
 said. 
 
 **Thou art a silly, wayward child," he 
 answered, with a slight frown. " But I can 
 afford to miss thy thanks for this small gew- 
 gaw of Indian cunning. Do I not hold in 
 reserve the gift of gifts — the dazzling, potent, 
 ineffable drops, that shall preserve for ever the 
 sparkle of thine eye, the dimple of thy cheek ? 
 What the daughters of magnificent kings have 
 
 29 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 yearned for in vain, shall it not be thine, thine 
 and for ever ? " 
 
 Again his eyes grew vague and mystic, 
 and seemed to be looking at the far distance. 
 
 " The unconscious child," he murmured to 
 himself; "I see an omen in her very beauty. 
 If God has given her such eyes, and features 
 of such rare perfection, is it not because they 
 are marked out by Heaven to last and never 
 know decay ; because she will be dowered with 
 the glory of sharing my first draught ? " 
 
 But Kosita shook her head. 
 
 " I have no wish for eternal youth, for 
 endless beauty," she said. "My mother did 
 without it, and why not I ? I wish to share 
 the common lot of humanity. I wish to be, 
 when the natural time comes, a little silver- 
 headed great-grandmother, all shrunk and bent, 
 with little twinkling eyes, who will sit and 
 spin by the blazing hearth, telling the children 
 fairy-tales all day." 
 
 *' A hideous blasphemy, a most monstrous 
 vision," said Don Luis, with a little shiver ; 
 
 80 
 
Indian Beads 
 
 '^ a vile, unnatural wish ! But, thank God 
 thy youth shall be preserved on thy cheek in 
 all its rosiness and all its sweet charm despite 
 thyself. And now listen. I brought thee this 
 rare necklace of Indian beads that it might 
 coax thee to greet with pleasure a piece of 
 news that will perhaps rather startle thee. I 
 have resolved to take thee to the new Indies 
 of the West." 
 
 Eosita turned very pale. 
 
 " Merciful Virgin ! " she cried ; "so my fears 
 were but too well founded." 
 
 " I have resolved to mortgage this place, 
 both lands and house," her father went on, 
 *' and stake my fortune on a venturous sail 
 beyond Hispaniola." 
 
 "Mortgage these walls! These broad fertile 
 lands ! Why, your very fathers, lying dead 
 in their graves, will shudder and turn round ! " 
 
 A smile of contempt flitted over the dreamy 
 face of the mystic. 
 
 " Poor buried fools," he said. " If only they 
 had had the wit to do as I am doing, they 
 
 31 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 would not to-day be dead and mouldering 
 bones, but living men, quick with the breath 
 of youth." 
 
 " Pledge these inherited acres," cried the 
 girl again ; " hand them over to the stranger ; 
 leave everything that is most familiar and 
 most dear ! You cannot mean it, father ; nor 
 can I believe it. Can you look on our ancestors' 
 portraits on the wall, and mention such a 
 project before their faces ? " 
 
 " Poor ghosts of paint and canvas," he 
 answered, looking up where she pointed, with 
 a not unfriendly pity ; " poor ghosts of paint 
 and canvas ! Had they not, in their piteous 
 dulness, rooted their lives like trees to their 
 inherited clods, but sought the Fountain like 
 me, their descendant, they would now be flesh 
 and blood. It isn't they who shall stop me 
 in my life's great scheme, just as the sunrise 
 of Success is unfolding. And now no more 
 discussion. I forbid it." 
 
 But at this point a sound of voices again 
 rose up through the open window. Her 
 
 32 
 
Indian Beads 
 
 father's expression changed to one of disgust 
 and loathing. 
 
 "What are those cracked voices?" he cried, 
 putting his hands to his ears. " What hideous 
 and loathsome song of crazed decrepitude? 
 Quick, shut the window. It makes me sick. 
 Those creaky cacklings are more than I can 
 bear." 
 
 " It is the village elders, who have come 
 for my birthday," said his daughter, as he 
 hurried from the room. "They have come to 
 wish me joy. They do so every year." 
 
 It was, as she said, the peasants who had 
 grown old and decrepit in the protection of 
 the family ; those who, standing on the edge 
 of the grave, could look back on the fields 
 they had tilled, on the fields that had heaped 
 up their garners through life. The earth had 
 given them of her best, had filled the casks 
 with the vintage, the hods with the olives. 
 Now she asked them for their bones in return, 
 and why should they grudge them ? The 
 bird must drop that another may sing upon 
 
 33 c 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 the bough ; the beast must die that another 
 may feed upon what it fed. And now they 
 came to wish long life and joy to one whose 
 feet were still wet with the dew of her dawn- 
 time, and brought her the tribute of an old 
 age that was willing to die. 
 
 " Come, dry your tears," said Cristina, as 
 she brought in the wreaths of the women and 
 the elders ; '' your father's mind may change." 
 
 **Thou knowest him little," answered Rosita, 
 " if thou thinkest he will turn upon his steps. 
 One drop of what he sails for to the Indies is 
 dearer to his heart than my life. I felt it 
 coming." 
 
 " Let me see the necklace of Indian beads," 
 said Cristina. 
 
 ''Yes, take it from my neck," answered her 
 mistress. " Were every bead that runs beneath 
 my finger a pill of poison, and full of deadly 
 peril, it could not be more ominous of mis- 
 fortune." 
 
 '' Do you believe in the Fount of Youth, 
 Madam ? " 
 
 34 
 
Indian Beads 
 
 "I don't know whether the Fount of Youth 
 exists," the girl said sadly; **but well I know 
 of one that does — the Fount of Sorrow. And 
 all who depend upon my father's pleasure, 
 will, sooner or later, have to drink of that." 
 
 ;k> 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 HEREDITARY FOES 
 
 The Alvaredas were the nearest neighbours of 
 the Medranas — the nearest, the most hated. 
 Ever since the day when, generations ago, a 
 Medrana had thundered off with the wife 
 of an Alvareda on his saddle-bow^ and had 
 defended his prize for years in his battlemented 
 castle against the united chiefs of the outraged 
 family, every Medrana had been reared in the 
 belief that the sweetest blood in the world was 
 that of an Alvareda, and every Alvareda had 
 trained his children to thirst for the blood of 
 a Medrana. Yet in the course of years the 
 hereditary feud might have yielded to the 
 influence of the somewhat gentler manners 
 that the new centuries were bringing with 
 them, and of the courtly habits that were 
 
 36 
 
Hereditary Foes 
 
 slowly replacing the mailed and helmeted life 
 of the past, if the old hatred had not been 
 suddenly and gratuitously revived some years 
 previously to the opening of this story, by the 
 action of the present owner of the Castle of 
 Alvareda, who, on the wedding day of the present 
 Medrana, had forced his horse into the church 
 during the ceremony, clattered up to the altar, 
 laid his hand on the bride as she stood there, 
 and almost succeeded in renewing the feat of 
 his ancestor's enemy. The days of private 
 war were over ; and the insult was wiped out 
 in a duel in which Don Luis, the victim of the 
 outrage, was so seriously wounded that his life 
 was for a moment despaired of. After that, 
 the Lord of Alvareda had contented himself 
 with seizing every opportunity that chance 
 offered to injure his enemy at court and in 
 private, till the latter, after the death of his 
 wife, which occurred when Eosita was five, 
 detaching himself more and more from the 
 world, had locked himself up in his study, and 
 given himself wholly to alchemistic research, 
 
 37 
 
The Romance of the Fountam 
 
 alone in his old turreted home with his mother- 
 less daughter. 
 
 Meanwhile, Juan, the younger son of 
 Alvareda, as soon as the first down had 
 appeared on his chin, had looked round him 
 for military employ. It was an unfortunate 
 moment. The centuries of Moorish warfare 
 had been brought to a close. The kingdom 
 of Granada, with the possibilities of knightly 
 prowess and romantic single combat that its 
 last flare of resistance and dying struggle still 
 afforded, was no more. The brilliant Italian 
 campaigns of Consalvo de Cordova were over 
 as well ; and the dream-transcending achieve- 
 ments of Cortes and Pizarro had yet to 
 astonish mankind. In the Indies of Columbus, 
 in Hispaniola and the neighbouring regions — 
 Guatemala and Yucatan and Honduras — where 
 the Indians were dying out in a single genera- 
 tion before the whip and the cross, staggering 
 under loads that the Spaniards would have 
 hesitated to set on the backs of their mules, 
 there seemed room but for the pirate, and 
 
 38 
 
Hereditary Foes 
 
 occasionally for the saint. But Juan was 
 neither, only a fearless young soldier, too 
 honest to play the part of the one, and too 
 full of youth and life to play the part of the 
 other. He had in him neither the stuff of a 
 Vlasco Nunez, nor that of a Las Casas ; and 
 the Indies, such as they were just at that 
 moment described by the home-returned soldier, 
 had no fascination for his soul. After three 
 or four years of garrison duty at Naples, where 
 he found small opportunity for action or pro- 
 motion, he returned home to Spain on a long 
 leave of absence, impatient and dissatisfied, to 
 see what interest could do for him in high 
 quarters, little suspecting that he was returning 
 to meet his fate in the person of his ancestral 
 enemy's daughter. 
 
 With a father so dreamy and so absorbed 
 in a life-search as hers, and no mother to w^atch 
 over her, it was not to be expected that Rosita 
 should be brought up like other girls of her 
 rank. But even if these peculiar circum- 
 stances had not existed, the rigid rules of 
 
 39 
 
The Eomance of the Fountain 
 
 control and seclusion which in the next two 
 centuries, under the Philips, rendered the 
 education of Spanish young ladies the wonder 
 of Europe, had not yet been elaborated, and 
 the heavy mantle of etiquette lay not yet on 
 the land. The girl saw little of the daughters 
 of her father's equals, but found friends for 
 herself among the neighbouring peasants and 
 farm hands of the castle, sharing their freedom 
 and often their occupations, though never to 
 the detriment of her inborn refinement. We 
 must do her father the justice to say that he 
 snatched many a half hour from his alchemistic 
 studies to impart some of his own varied culture 
 to his daughter, who, if she grew up wilder and 
 freer and healthier than the damozels of her 
 class, who were in the hands of the duenna 
 and the priest, also developed in intelligence 
 and knowledge, as they were never likely to 
 do. She loved to stand sickle in hand with 
 her humble companions in the great golden 
 expanses of the corn, or stand with them on 
 the ladder, picking the green and purple olives 
 
 40 
 
Hereditary Foes 
 
 that they poured into their hods, or join in 
 the vintage in the weakening September sun, 
 helping to heap the bunches in the great round 
 vats that were carried into the castle yard. 
 Or she would stroll with some freckled peasant 
 maiden, her friend, nutting far away in the 
 woods, or help in his bird-nesting some eight 
 year old boy of the farm. 
 
 So there was no lack of opportunity, when 
 love came to her one day in a more romantic 
 shape than the formal request for her hand that 
 would probably have been made to any other 
 father than hers. And as fate would have it, 
 love came from the enemy's camp. Juan saw 
 her one fair summer evening, as she stood in 
 the tall ripe corn in the sunset; and little 
 guessing whose name she bore, gazed at her 
 in her beauty, and felt his heart tighten with 
 a wild wistful longing, not the evil blighting 
 desire that her intelligence would have 
 recognised and fled from, but a sudden 
 illumination of his soul that told him that 
 all that he wished to live for, all that he 
 
 41 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 wished to live with, was standing that moment 
 before him. They stood a moment in silence. 
 He spoke, she answered ; they met again else- 
 where, and yet again; and by the time they 
 learned each other's name, their souls, their 
 fates, were no longer their own, and an hour 
 of love had obliterated centuries of hate. 
 
 But it was a terrible position. There was 
 no possible issue that did not involve a break 
 with everything that had hitherto been dear- 
 home and friends and associations and prospects. 
 There was no probability that the father of 
 either would ever relent or forgive. To declare 
 their love publicly was to rush into the arms 
 of disaster, and to keep it secret was to live 
 in continual fear. Juan's intentions were 
 honourable ; indeed respect was the very 
 essence of his love. The idea of a secret 
 marriage was abandoned as soon as broached. 
 The consequences that it entailed would only 
 have brought about the discovery and the 
 wrath a few months later than an open 
 avowal. 
 
 42 
 
Hereditary Foes 
 
 Such was the situation when Don Luis's 
 decision to embark for the Indies on a wild 
 and perilous quest, and take his daughter 
 with him, seemed suddenly to bring matters 
 to a head. Then Juan hesitated no longer, but 
 urged Eosita with all the eloquence of love to 
 break with the past and all her belongings, 
 to marry him at once, and seek in flight an 
 issue from an intolerable deadlock. It meant 
 the end of all his dreams of success, all his 
 prospects of fortune ; but he saw no other way. 
 
 But Eosita was unshakable. She loved her 
 fond dreamer of a father at bottom with a 
 passionate love that could not requite the 
 gentleness of years with desertion and betrayal. 
 
 " I cannot let him go to the Indies without 
 me," she said firmly. "He is bent on the 
 voyage, and I know him too well to persuade 
 myself that he will ever abandon the project. 
 He is going to the lands of fever, the lands 
 of a thousand perils, and will need me there 
 more than he ever has here. Do you suppose 
 I could bear to think of his lying perhaps 
 
 43 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 helpless and abandoned in some primeval forest, 
 calling on my name in vain, and dying for 
 the lack of the help I might have given him? 
 I will never desert him ; never, never ! " 
 
 *' He is bent on a madman's quest," said 
 Juan sternly ; *' and the maddest thing of all 
 is his decision to take you with him to the 
 Indies. It is you that will tremble with fever 
 and fall with fatigue in the horrible swamps 
 and jungles of the West, while it will be he 
 that will abandon you to follow the glitter 
 of his magic water. ..." 
 
 "Mad or not," answered Rosita, "my place 
 is by his side. We must trust in God and the 
 future." 
 
 Again Juan pleaded against her resolution, 
 pleaded with every argument of love and cruel 
 presentiment ; but all to no purpose. He could 
 not shake her resolve, no more than she could 
 shake her father's. When at last he realised 
 the hopelessness of his appeal, he dropped it 
 suddenly. 
 
 " Then I know what I shall do," he said. 
 
 44 
 
CHAPTEE IV 
 
 PREPARATIONS 
 
 Don Luis was now surrounded from morning 
 to night by adventurers from the Indies. The 
 journey to Cadiz, the nearest and principal 
 western port, was not long ; and the castle 
 now almost always sheltered two or three of 
 them, who fattened on the best that it con- 
 tained, at the easy expense of spinning im- 
 probable yarns for the benefit of its lord. His 
 study was now filled to overflowing with maps, 
 models of ships, globes, and nautical instru- 
 ments, which replaced the alembics and crucibles 
 of his now discarded alchemistic experiments. 
 Some of his new friends had shared in the 
 later voyages of Columbus, others were mere 
 masters of ships that carried supplies to the 
 now organised colony of Hispaniola, mostly ill- 
 
 45 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 shaven, woollen-capped, ignorant fellows, among 
 whom was more than one whose antecedents 
 would ill have borne enquiry. One of them, 
 however, belonged to a somewhat different 
 class. He had sailed as mate with Vasco de 
 Gama and the Portuguese, had rounded the 
 Cape of Storms, and had later entered the 
 service of the Spaniards and held positions of 
 some authority in their new possessions of the 
 West. This man, by name Diego Perez, soon 
 ousted the others in his patron's favour ; took 
 in his character at a glance ; entered at once 
 into his scheme — which he saw could be turned 
 to his own advantage — and obtained in a few 
 weeks a strange empire over his mind. They 
 were daily closeted together for hours. It was 
 already an understood thing that he was to be 
 the dreamer's immediate subordinate in the 
 expedition which he hoped to equip at no 
 very distant date. 
 
 The more Don Luis thought over the matter, 
 the more he felt persuaded that what he sought 
 lay in the new Indies, or rather in the still 
 
 46 
 
Preparations 
 
 undiscovered islands that lay beyond them. 
 And now Diego Perez daily brought him some 
 new item, some new idea, that tended to con- 
 firm his belief, and had the skill to make him 
 imagine that the new suggestion had occurred 
 to his own mind. 
 
 '* It is wonderful," he said to his patron one 
 day, " how a solitary thinker in his silent study 
 will sometimes anticipate the discoveries which 
 the man of action is making thousands of miles 
 away in the world of concrete things. When 
 the abstract reasoner and the practical pioneer 
 come to the same conclusion, each from his 
 own materials ; when they both suspect a great 
 and deep-hidden secret from utterly difierent 
 indications, you may be pretty sure that those 
 double clues lead to a great reality. I don't 
 pretend to understand by what processes of 
 reasoning, by what successive steps, you came 
 to the thought that the great treasure you 
 were seeking lay in the Western Indies ; I 
 only know that it was an intuition of genius. 
 A hundred trifles that forced themselves on 
 
 47 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 me in Hispaniola and Yucatan confirm it. I 
 told you what the Indian Cabeza Blanca told 
 me. . . ." 
 
 **Then you really share my belief," Don 
 Luis interrupted, " that the wonderful water 
 is not supernatural, but only a fountain of 
 transcendent medicinal virtue ? " 
 
 *' I am certain of it," answered Diego Perez, 
 *'but it is all the surer for that. It is a 
 natural mineral spring of unexampled potency. 
 It evidently contains youth-restoring elements 
 that are unknown to mankind ; and, as I have 
 said, it lies in the land of Bimini." 
 
 *' Strange," said his patron, *' there is a 
 passage in Presepius about a wonderful in- 
 vigorating mineral, which Beckerius in his 
 Commentary calls Sal Juventutis. No modern 
 author has been able to identify it. Perhaps 
 the Fountain has flowed over deep beds of it." 
 
 " I should think it very likely," said the 
 other. " I took notes at the time of what the 
 Indians told me about it. I have them 
 somewhere. I must try and find them. 
 
 48 
 
Preparations 
 
 Unfortunately, it was just at the time of my 
 quarrel with Eovedo about some absurd slaves 
 of his that I mistook for rebel natives and 
 shut up in a barn and roasted. So I had to 
 leave the place in a hurry. I had been 
 collecting information right and left for future 
 use. Ah, if only I had been Governor of 
 Hispaniola at that moment, with ships and 
 men at my disposal, instead of a simple hidalgo 
 with the shadow of the gallows flitting over 
 him, and the feel of the rope itching on his 
 neck ! I tell you there are realms beyond 
 Hispaniola that no man but myself suspects, 
 not uncivilised islands like Hispaniola and 
 Cuba, with miserable populations that are 
 only fit to toil under the lash like worn-out 
 mules and broken-kneed horses ; but realms 
 with great cities and temples and organised 
 millions, that might be conquered with a few 
 falconets and a dozen kegs of powder. There 
 are temple treasuries of gold and pearls and 
 rubies only waiting to be sacked, mines of 
 precious metal by the side of which those of 
 
 49 D 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 Hispaniola are as a beggar's purse to an 
 emperor's. . . ." 
 
 "Never mind the gold and the pearls," Don 
 Luis interrupted impatiently ; " what of the 
 water ? " 
 
 " Ah, the water ! " Perez repeated. " Of 
 course ; I was forgetting. The gold and the 
 gems are insignificant beside it. Well, as I 
 was saying, there can be no doubt that it lies 
 in that realm of Bimini which I should certainly 
 have reached if only I had not unfortunately 
 been under a cloud, and unable to get a hearing 
 from those in power. I often talked to the 
 Indians on the subject. One Indian especially 
 used to tell me about it. He had been carried 
 out to sea by the tide in his canoe, had drifted 
 to the coasts of Bimini, and had lived there 
 three years. . . ." 
 
 "And how many of the inhabitants w^ere 
 ever young ? For I take it for granted that 
 the use of the Fountain w^as limited ; else they 
 would increase beyond measure and starve." 
 
 * ' It was only their King who was ever 
 
 50 
 
Preparations 
 
 young, and the few he allows to share the 
 draught. He alone had the secret of the 
 place where the Fountain is hidden. But if 
 an invader could seize his person, he could 
 soon be made to reveal it. You might leave 
 that to me." 
 
 "And did you ask your Indian whether he 
 looked transcendently young ? " 
 
 "He looked about twenty," answered Diego 
 Perez. "My Indian friend had often seen 
 him. But he was centuries old." 
 
 " It is curious," said Don Luis, " that the 
 people never extorted the secret from their 
 monarch. They might then all have been 
 young." 
 
 "They are a submissive race," the other 
 replied, "at least if they are like the other 
 Indians I have known. And as I said 
 yesterday, a small well-appointed Spanish force 
 would soon split open their country like a 
 cocoanut. You see, they have no gunpowder — 
 only arrows and javelins. A handful of our 
 men — such men as have fought under Consalvo 
 
 51 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 de Cordova, for id stance — would suffice. We 
 have irresistible weapons ; some, for example, 
 that the Holy Office could lend us, if the 
 King of the Magic Water were too hard of 
 persuasion. I have tried that sort of thing 
 on the Indians myself with excellent results." 
 " Well, between you and me," said the 
 Seeker of Youth thoughtfully, " though I have 
 never for one moment wavered in my belief 
 as to the Fount of Youth itself — no mpn 
 could be so mad as that after all that has 
 been written on the subject — yet I have 
 always had my doubts as to the wonders with 
 which report has surrounded it. I always 
 suspected the dragons and other monsters 
 that are said to protect it. But the idea that 
 its potency is natural is entirely new, and 
 certainly simplifies matters." 
 
 62 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 A ROYAL AUDIENCE 
 
 As the head of a younger branch of one of 
 
 the greatest families of Spain, Don Luis de 
 
 Medrana had numerous friends and relatives 
 
 at court ; and if only he could obtain the King's 
 
 ear, made no doubt of arousing his interest in 
 
 the great quest which he proposed to undertake. 
 
 The Fountain of Youth was universally believed 
 
 in ; its existence was taken for granted by rich 
 
 and poor, by great and small ; and Ferdinand 
 
 the Catholic had no more reason to doubt of 
 
 it than anybody else. The only mystery was 
 
 its exact situation. This the Seeker believed 
 
 himself to have very nearly located ; and by 
 
 the time that his friends had succeeded in 
 obtaining for him the promise of an audience, 
 
 53 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 he was ready with details far more concrete and 
 far less fabulous than those he had found in the 
 yellow folios of his library, or in the traditions 
 of Jew and Moor, and was prepared to submit 
 to the king a scheme which, given the universal 
 belief in the existence of the magic spring, had 
 a very fair chance of being listened to, and in 
 no wise implied that its author was a dreamer 
 or a dupe. 
 
 Ferdinand was at Valladolid. On the par- 
 ticular morning for which the audience had 
 been fixed, he was in a fretful mood, due 
 partly to a more than usually present con- 
 sciousness of the growing aches and infirmities 
 of age, and partly to an unsatisfactory report 
 which he had been reading on the gold supply 
 of Hispaniola. He was putting the last 
 touches to his toilet with the assistance of the 
 Marquis of Villarica, his confidential groom of 
 the chamber. 
 
 "Hand me my dagger and my gold chain," 
 the King was saying. " I can recall the time, 
 Villarica, when my white bony fingers were so 
 
 54 
 
A Royal Audience 
 
 plump, that I could scarce force these same 
 rings on or oflf. And now they are continually 
 trickling off of themselves." 
 
 "Your Grace has thinned from overmuch 
 thought, not from years," answered the Marquis. 
 "Believe me, it is not age, but care and study. 
 Your Grace needs only repose to gain in flesh." 
 
 The King shook his head. 
 
 " I wish my ribs and fingers had remained as 
 plump as thy flattery," he said ; "for that, my 
 friend, continues in all its fat exuberance. 
 Who stands inscribed for private audience, 
 first on this morning's list ? " 
 
 "The Suitor, your Grace vouchsafes to see 
 to please the Duke of Arcos." 
 
 "Don Luis de Medrana?" said the King 
 with a frown. " He has some plan or other 
 beyond sea, has he not? If I had not given 
 my royal word to Arcos, I wouldn't waste my 
 patience in listening to his project ; and as it 
 is, I mean co give him ten minutes' audience, 
 not one more. Yet another of those seekers of 
 the West ! As if I hadn't wasted sufficient time 
 
 65 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 and thought and ships and money on the irk- 
 some rogues who promise such wonders ! To 
 begin with, that arch-knave Columbus, in whose 
 dreams my good lamented Queen put such 
 sweet faith. Oh, we wxre so certain of the 
 gains ; it was so clear and easy. You had only 
 to find the East by sailing to the West — only 
 to reach the sun by flying to the moon — and 
 all the treasures of auriferous Ind w^ould flow 
 into your lap in rivers of ingots. We were to 
 reach the ruby-rolling torrents beyond Bagdad, 
 the porcelain-towered cities of the Grand Khan 
 of Tartary and what not, where the streets were 
 paved with slabs of silver, the houses roofed 
 w^ith tiles of gold ; where the very beggars were 
 dressed in yellow silk, with pearls in the 
 bonnets they held out to beg for diamond 
 pence. Much gold we got ! A little less than 
 you would find to-day in any goldsmith's shop 
 of Cordova or Burgos ! . . ." 
 
 ** And yet," said the Marquis, ''that Genoese 
 set up your Grace's standard in more than one 
 island where it still flutters. I shall never 
 
 66 
 
A Royal Audience 
 
 forget the day when he returned from his first 
 daring voyage, amid the acclamations of the 
 people, bringing his Indians with him." 
 
 " Bringing his Indians ? A dozen red-skinned 
 savages, wild scoundrels with no attire but a 
 nose-ring — and mighty fit raiment it was for the 
 islands of swamp and ague they came from. 
 . . . And while we were losing time in crazy 
 western plans, the Portuguese, by creeping 
 patiently eastwards, round by the Cape of 
 Storms, reached Muscat and Calicut, made 
 treaties with their sultans, plundered cities, 
 and filled their ships with gold. No, no, 
 my friend ; don't talk to me of further western 
 projects." 
 
 ** Will your Grace see him ? " asked Villarica. 
 
 *' I suppose I must, since I have pledged my 
 word to Arcos. And besides, his birth entitles 
 him to a hearing. He was one of my pages in 
 his youth. But bid him cut his speeches short. 
 Ten minutes, not one more." 
 
 As Don Luis entered, Ferdinand did not wait 
 even to let him finish the deep obeisance with 
 
 67 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 which he bowed before him, but addressed him 
 testily then and there. 
 
 "And so thou too," he cried, "hast got a 
 wonderful western scheme, an expedition that 
 is to pour more gold into my coffers than all 
 the ships of Christendom put together can 
 carry, eh ? " 
 
 " I crave the most humble pardon of my 
 Liege," answered the Suitor, while an almost 
 imperceptible smile flitted over his grave mystic 
 face. " My Liege has been misinformed. I 
 have not come to offer your Grace new mines 
 of gold, but with your most royal licence, to 
 rid you of your silver." 
 
 " Of my silver ? " exclaimed the King. " My 
 friends and flatterers already do that most 
 perfectly. Thy help, good friend, is nob 
 needed." 
 
 " I have come to ofl'er your Grace the means 
 by which the clear white silver upon your royal 
 brow shall be transmuted back to the darker 
 locks of youth." 
 
 " Is he a merchant of the Venetian hair-dye?" 
 
 58 
 
A Royal Audience 
 
 asked Ferdinand, turning to the Marquis of 
 Villarica. 
 
 The Suitor winced, but recovered himself at 
 once. 
 
 " Your Grace has made me bite my lip," he 
 said with another deep inclination. **But"_if I 
 could have the patience of your royal ear for a 
 few short minutes, I think I could fetter your 
 attention." 
 
 "Speak on, but not in riddles," said 
 Ferdinand. '' I will listen." 
 
 '' I know as well as any," the other resumed, 
 "that the West and the Indies of Columbus 
 have somewhat belied men's dreams of gold and 
 gems. But they contain another treasure of 
 such wonderful value, of such extreme and 
 ineffable price to him who shall first make it 
 his, that all the gold that men have clutched at 
 in their wildest imaginings, would be but dross 
 by its side." 
 
 "Indeed, and what is that?" said the King 
 somewhat ironically. 
 
 "The Fountain of Youth. We know from 
 
 59 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 certain and undoubtable informations, that the 
 Spring which man has panted for during count- 
 less generations in every clime and in every 
 age, with a wistful and infinite thirst, lies in 
 the Western Indies, in a realm north of 
 Hispaniola, named Bimini, whose King, the 
 sole possessor of the secret, is called the 
 Ever Beautiful, and has reigned six hundred 
 years." 
 
 '*Bad for the heir apparent," muttered 
 Villarica under his breath. 
 
 " No shapes of magic/' went on Don Luis, 
 " guard the potent spring. No circling dragons 
 watch it by day and night. No evil angels 
 sit by its brink and mirror their dark wings in 
 its waves. It hath neither spell nor super- 
 natural essence, but is mere natural water — a 
 single little rill — which in its bright limpidity 
 hath flowed through subterranean channels, over 
 beds of mineral ore and salts unknown to 
 man, or through a filter of medicinal mosses, 
 of such high potency and curative virtue, that 
 they can arrest the onward march of age, can 
 
 60 
 
A Eoyal Audience 
 
 create anew the wasted tissues of the body, 
 and fill with fresh sap the withered branches 
 of life." 
 
 ''What hides it then?" asked Ferdinand. 
 '' What protects it from the common herd of 
 mankind ? " 
 
 " The dreadful guard of Nature," the Suitor 
 answered ; '* inextricable forests and morasses, 
 haunts of the panther and of every clawed 
 assassin, in whose clueless tangle and pestilential 
 depths no white man has ever yet ventured ; 
 where the twilight awakens in every tree a 
 vampire bat, who fans the sleeper with his 
 monstrous leather wings, and sucks his blood 
 at night ; where there are trees whose dark 
 silent leaves distil a subtle vapour that converts 
 sleep into death, and strange treacherous flowers 
 whose scent breeds madness, till the forest rings 
 with crazy laughter ; where, among the grasses, 
 there lurk porcupines that shoot a venomous 
 quill, whereof the wound turns black like the 
 flesh of a mushroom ; where there are snakes 
 that make a running noose round your throat 
 
 61 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 and strangle you in sleep, before you have time 
 to feel their coils. Man-eating Indians, whose 
 poisoned arrows, shot by an unseen hand, 
 change the blood into liquid fire in every vein, 
 infest the dreadful region." 
 
 He paused, and waited for the King to speak. 
 Ferdinand had listened with attention, and now 
 looked at his visitor with incredulity perhaps, 
 but not with the impatience of a few minutes 
 before. 
 
 " And thou proposest to ransack such a region 
 for a rill, for a mere hidden trickling thread of 
 water ? " he said. 
 
 *' Were that my thought," the other answered, 
 " your Grace might well call me mad. No ; 
 my plan is this : to land a small picked force, 
 armed with three falconets and sufficient 
 powder, on the Biminian coast, and with the 
 help of the disaffected tribes — for such I know 
 there are — to march boldly on the capital and 
 seize the King, and then extort the secret of 
 the Fountain as his ransom. I could defray 
 part of the expenses of the expedition out of 
 
 62 
 
A Eoyal Audience 
 
 my own private fortune, if your Grace would 
 furnish me with three ships and their crews. 
 Half of the soldiers could be shipped at 
 Hispaniola. The conquest of Bimini would be 
 profitable to the Church : for, once having made 
 the Indian monarch's body ours, we could attack 
 his soul, and win it back from his unholy gods. 
 The Holy Office would find the means of 
 teaching his people the greater sweetness of 
 our more merciful faith." 
 
 *' If he has reigned six hundred years, I 
 fear his errors must be deep rooted," said 
 Ferdinand. *' What is thy Biminian King's 
 name i 
 
 "Atalpa, the Ever Young, so please your 
 Grace." 
 
 " North of Hispaniola, thou sayest ? How 
 far north ? " 
 
 " Three hundred leagues of water, according 
 to my computations ; but I admit that the 
 distance is only approximate." 
 
 The King's brow had grown thoughtful. 
 For a few moments he seemed to forget the 
 
 63 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 presence of his visitor, and to lose himself in 
 the past or the future. 
 
 ''I cannot grant thee longer speech this 
 morning," he said at last, '' but I will give 
 thee next week another and more ample 
 audience. Meanwhile, write out thy scheme 
 more fully." 
 
 And giving Don Luis his hand to kiss, he 
 dismissed him with a not ungracious nod. 
 
 When the door had closed on his visitor, 
 the King w^alked up and down the room for 
 a while. 
 
 " Strange, very strange," he said, stopping 
 and addressing the Marquis. " Is this the 
 dream of a madman, based on mere air, or 
 hath it weight and substance ? What dost 
 thou think, Villarica ? " 
 
 " Like your Grace," the Marquis answered, 
 '* I chew the cud of my perplexity. It seems 
 to me unnatural that the Fountain should be 
 mere natural water. Suj^ernatural water would 
 be far more natural." 
 
 " The Fountain exists," said Ferdinand. ''That 
 
 64 
 
A Koyal Audience 
 
 much is a certain and unquestioned fact. It 
 exists on some point or other of the earth. 
 We have abundant testimony to that. Then 
 why not in the Indies? — It would be strange 
 if I were to live to bless that rogue Columbus 
 for finding me those unprofitable islands. I 
 wonder whether the draught would keep me as 
 I now am, and merely keep at bay the further 
 years, or whether it would place me back in the 
 strongest moment of manhood, — such as I was, 
 for instance, on that triumphant morning when 
 Isabel and I rode side by side through the 
 trembling alleys of Granada, at last made 
 ours ? " 
 
 He resumed his walk up and down. 
 
 *' The wide and general use of such a cordial 
 would be full of peril," he soliloquised, " and 
 would very soon over-populate the earth. We 
 should have to imitate the policy of the Indian 
 king, and jealously guard the Fountain from 
 the general mass of mankind. Its use would 
 have to be strictly confined to my own self 
 and to the finder, or all would drink and live. 
 
 65 S 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 A pretty state of things if Gaffer Maximilian 
 or the Pope were each made immortal on his 
 throne ! ... An eternal King of France would 
 never do. But if the King of Aragon were 
 immortal, the case would be somewhat different. 
 How time flies ! How white my hair has 
 become in these last twelve months. . . . And 
 my old hands, how thin and white and veiny 
 they have grown. ... A little more, and 1 
 shall have to bid the goldsmith come, to tighten 
 my rings." 
 
 66 
 
CHAPTEE VI 
 
 THE START 
 
 So the King's interest in tlie sclienie having 
 
 been secured, and the necessary orders sent 
 
 forth, in a very few months the new expedition 
 
 was in full preparation. Ferdinand had been 
 
 more liberal of money than any one could have 
 
 expected ; and the mortgages on Don Luis's 
 
 lands — almost equivalent to the total sale, and 
 
 practically constituting the surrender of his 
 
 fortune — had brought in a very considerable 
 
 sum. From the dim shadow of a mystic's 
 
 study, the project had passed into the noisy 
 
 sunlight of arsenal and port. The mystic 
 
 himself had become a commander, dealing no 
 
 longer with dreams and traditions, but with 
 
 67 
 
The Romance of the Foimtam 
 
 concrete men and concrete things — sailors and 
 soldiers, dockyard officials, pikes and swords, 
 cannon and powder, and all the provisions of 
 a long ocean voyage. 
 
 The men were recruited mainly at Cadiz, 
 which was full of time-expired soldiers from 
 Italy and elsewhere. Many of them had been 
 to the Indies already — nay, more than once. 
 Other men, and further provisions of war, 
 were to be picked up at Hispaniola, where 
 the Governor was ordered to lend all the 
 assistance in his power, and where all were to 
 rest for a while, before setting sail on the 
 unexplored waters beyond. 
 
 Small though the expedition was, it included 
 men from nearly all the still ill - welded 
 provinces of Ferdinand's monarchy. Nearly 
 all the dialects of the Peninsula might have 
 been heard among them, from the harsh and 
 unintelligible Basque of the North to the soft 
 and familiar Andalusian of the South. The 
 men were of all ages and character, and had 
 served in the most opposite parts of the 
 
 68 
 
The Start 
 
 world ; and they retained, in whole or in part, 
 the dress and accoutrements of the various 
 corps to which they had belonged. But, for 
 all that, they had one thing in common, 
 adventurers and scratch crew though they 
 were. They had all of them that military 
 quality which was making the Spanish infantry 
 the admiration of Europe — a quality which 
 was the result of centuries of Moorish warfare, 
 of a climate uniting the bitterest extremes of 
 sun and snow and wind, of religious fanaticism, 
 and of a dare-devil spirit that the Devil alone 
 could perhaps have explained. 
 
 Nothing could exceed Don Luis's activity. 
 He and Diego Perez were daily on their feet 
 from early morning till dusk, seeing to the 
 equipping of the two vessels — the third was 
 to be fitted out at Hispaniola — and the 
 enrolment of the men. Nor surely would 
 any one have recognised the stooping grey- 
 bearded scholar with the dark -brown robe 
 and wistful careworn face in the alert and 
 commanding figure with the shining steel cap 
 
 69 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 and breastplate, who, waving his long bright 
 
 rapier in his gauntleted hand, was reviewing 
 
 his company on the noisy wharf, before finally 
 
 embarking on the wonderful quest. The 
 
 success of his application to the King, and 
 
 the conversion of his vague surmises into the 
 
 sights and sounds of tangible enterprise, had 
 
 indeed transfigured him beyond recognition. 
 
 He seemed twenty years younger, and the 
 
 Water of Youth seemed to have acted on 
 
 its indefatigable votary even before he had 
 
 found it. 
 
 But active and busy as Don Luis showed 
 
 himself, the soldiers and crews soon discovered 
 
 that he was the commander of the expedition 
 
 only in name. Though Diego Perez made a 
 
 great show of taking his patron's orders in 
 
 every question that arose, it was always his 
 
 suggestion that was ultimately carried out, his 
 
 will that ultimately j^revailed. And indeed 
 
 it could scarcely have been otherwise ; even 
 
 if there had been nothing in the two men's 
 
 characters to account for such a relation 
 
 70 
 
The Start 
 
 between them. For in all practical details, 
 the efficiency of the Dreamer's lieutenant, or 
 Chief Captain, as he was called, was un- 
 challenged. He had sailed too many seas, 
 had dealt with men of too many race^, had 
 engaged in too many hard practical schemes, 
 for the men not instinctively to recognise 
 which was the real master, which of the two 
 it was the more dangerous to disobey. Perez 
 was too completely the type of the pirate- 
 adventurer of his century, not to command 
 the respect, though never the love, of a 
 typical crew. And the Seeker of Youth, on 
 the other hand, had brought with him too 
 many dreams and too many compunctions, too 
 much that was vague and unreal, for him 
 ever to be a leader of men. 
 
 Nothing that could conduce to diminish for 
 Eosita the strain and distress of the great 
 voyage was omitted. Her tiny cabin in the 
 larger of the two vessels starting from Cadiz 
 had been fitted up with every comfort and 
 dainty adornment that a jubilant father's 
 
 71 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 fondness had been able to devise for so limited 
 a space. Even before going on board, she 
 had won the affection of the men. She had 
 already found numerous occasions of showing 
 kindness to the mothers or wives or sweet- 
 hearts they were leaving behind them. It 
 was seldom — indeed, perhaps the first time — 
 that a girl of her rank and delicate beauty 
 had embarked for the new Indies of the West ; 
 and cruel and hardened to the horrors of 
 war as were the adventurers her father had 
 collected, there were many among them who 
 could still feel something like a chivalrous 
 devotion to the Fairy Princess that w^as about 
 to be exposed to dangers that they knew but 
 too well. 
 
 Rosita was leaving Europe without having 
 bidden her lover farewell. Juan de Alvareda 
 had suddenly disappeared without a word of 
 explanation or warning soon after the expedi- 
 tion was officially decreed. Some said that he 
 had left for Naples to take up his soldiering 
 under his old standards. Others declared that 
 
 72 
 
The Start 
 
 he had gone to Yalladolid to hang about the 
 court for some civil employment. The only- 
 thing that was certain was that he had left 
 Andalusia, and had left it in haste. In her 
 heart there was an aching void. As she sat in 
 the stern of the ship, gazing at the dwindling 
 shore of the land of her birth, on the steeples 
 and roofs she was perhaps leaving for ever, 
 what troubled her most was her fear for his 
 safety. She knew well enough that he would 
 never have let her leave as she was leaving, 
 if he had been a free agent. That he had 
 forsaken her never even entered her mind. 
 But as she thought of his inexplicable silence, 
 Spain, which was fading in the dusk and the 
 distance, seemed to hold nothing but doubt ; 
 w^hile the western horizon, where the sun had 
 gone down, and for which they were sailing, 
 hid but the dread and the unknown. 
 
 73 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 IN HISPANIOLA 
 
 And now let us turn to Juan de Alvareda and 
 explain his mysterious disappearance. 
 
 When he had been informed of Don Luis's 
 determination to embark for the Indies and 
 take Rosita with him, he had, as we have seen, 
 at first hoped to persuade her to abandon her 
 home and marry him clandestinely somewhere 
 in Europe. But when nothing that he could 
 urge could shake her decision to accompany her 
 father, he at once formed a plan to share under 
 a feigned name in the proposed expedition, so 
 as at least to be able to watch over her and 
 protect her from the dangers to which he fore- 
 saw she would be exposed. But it seemed to 
 him better to pick up the ships at Hispaniola 
 
 74 
 
In Hispaniola 
 
 than to enlist in Spain where he was known. 
 As soon therefore as the King's decree appointing 
 Don Luis de Medrana commander of the little 
 squadron was published and preparations openly 
 begun, he started for Palos, preferring that port 
 to Cadiz, where he would probably have been 
 recognised. At Palos he learnt that a ship was 
 on the point of weighing anchor for the new 
 colony. It was too good an opportunity to 
 miss. So securing a passage upon it, he wrote 
 a letter to Rosita, informing her of his move- 
 ments, and entrusted it to a friar who was 
 leaving for Cadiz. This letter the friar lost, 
 and Rosita was in consequence never apprized 
 of his departure for the Indies, but was allowed 
 to eat away her heart in uncertainty. 
 
 And if in her doubt of what had become 
 of him, dark pictures of danger crowded her 
 dreams, they were probably no darker than 
 what actually befell. The long voyage out, 
 through weeks and weeks of stormy seas, was 
 in his case perhaps no worse than what a 
 crossing of the Atlantic had to be in those days, 
 
 75 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 in a ship that the waves played with like a 
 nutshell that dances on a pond in the wind, 
 and in the company of convicts and negroes, 
 of adventurers and slavers, and of but few 
 honest men. Yet all went comparatively well 
 till Hispaniola was sighted. But then the crash 
 came. Her tortured imagination might have 
 seen a ship going to pieces on the desolate 
 rocks ; a huddled crowd of survivors fighting 
 for a few miserable shell-fish with the fury of 
 starving hounds. And then again in her dream 
 she might have recognised a familiar figure in 
 one of two men who volunteered to swim the 
 arm of raging sea that divided the rocks from 
 the land, push through the great tangled forests 
 and frightful uninhabited glens in search 
 of some settlement, and send help to the 
 others. 
 
 Juan's comrade was a convict who still wore 
 a shackle-ring on one of his feet, and was 
 branded on brow and on back. That quarter 
 of the great island had as yet but few settle- 
 ments. What still remained of the natives had 
 
 76 
 
Ill Hispaniola 
 
 been gathered by the Spaniards round the mines 
 and in distant plantations ; and wild beasts 
 had the rest pretty much to themselves. After 
 days and days of wading through almost 
 impenetrable undergrowth, of climbing along 
 mountain ridges, and plunging deep down into 
 valleys that seemed to lead nowhere, the convict 
 was bitten by a snake, and died in a dreadful 
 convulsion. Juan was left to push on alone 
 through the horrible solitude, living on a few 
 nuts and berries, ever endeavouring to keep 
 to one direction with the help of the implacable 
 sun by day, of the burning constellations by 
 night. Oh, the intolerable stare of those stars, 
 pulsing and throbbing in their uncountable 
 multitudes : now seeming bent on maddening 
 him by their silent consciousness of his plight, 
 and now again, on a revulsion of his mood, 
 seeming to add to his loneliness by their utter 
 unconsciousness of what they looked down on 
 but did not see ! Then one day he suddenly 
 stumbled on a white man and an Indian, both 
 in a physical condition yet more lamentable 
 
 77 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 than his own. The white man told him that 
 he had been condemned to hard labour, and that 
 he and the Indian had escaped together from a 
 gang to which they belonged. They had built 
 themselves a sort of stifling hut, and the Indian 
 had constructed some traps with which they 
 caught small creatures of the forest, enough to 
 satisfy hunger for the moment. Juan shared 
 their life for some time, when suddenly one day 
 the three were surprised and overpowered by 
 a party of Spaniards searching for runaways, 
 and, heavily chained, were dragged to the 
 nearest gold mines. He would have found no 
 difficulty in persuading his captors of his rank 
 and antecedents ; but they were in want of 
 hands, and it was more convenient to assume 
 that he was a runaway slave and incorporate 
 him in one of the gangs. While he w^as w^aiting 
 for the overseer to dispose of him, he had leisure 
 to observe the gangs at their work. This, w^here 
 he happened to be, consisted in clearing the 
 forest round a steep gully. He saw enormous 
 tree-trunks being dragged by thirty Indians and 
 
 78 
 
In Hispaniola 
 
 six convicts under the long curling lashes of 
 their warders, their naked and sore-covered 
 bodies writhing as they panted up the steep 
 hill slope in a sort of horrible human harness. 
 And he might have seen worse ; for the native 
 population of Hispaniola was driven over the 
 brink of existence in a single generation. It 
 is written in the soul-book of the white man 
 for his children to read at their leisure. 
 
 The next day Juan was afforded an oppor- 
 tunity of trying the system in person. Through 
 the whole of the endless twelve hours he formed 
 part of the terrible team ; the whip coming down 
 in continual whirling lashes on the dark naked 
 shoulders beside him, then suddenly on his own. 
 Tree after tree was dragged up the slope. Then 
 night covered all for a while, and the teams were 
 locked up in long stifling sheds. There his 
 thoughts were too crowded to take effectual 
 shape. They seemed continually to relapse into 
 numbness and pain, but not into sleep. The 
 hideous vision of endless days like the one he 
 
 had passed kept mixing with the thought of 
 
 79 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 Rosita, with fear for her safety, with the idea 
 that she would sail forth into the unknown 
 ocean without him. 
 
 The first whiteness of dawn stole in through 
 the chinks ; the sleeping forms of his com- 
 panions in misery detached themselves slowly 
 from out of the darkness. Juan was near to 
 the door, against which lay a warder asleep. 
 It was the man whose lash had fallen that day 
 on his shoulders pitilessly, unremittingly. He 
 saw the handle of a knife peeping out from the 
 man's sash. He crept up and possessed himself 
 of it. He had the man at his mercy. A quick 
 silent blow, and he would have been free. The 
 temptation was terrific, but he could not do 
 it. He could not cross over to Rosita on the 
 stepping-stone of murder. 
 
 Again another horrible day in the team. 
 Then, before the men were again locked up for 
 the night, they were searched. The knife had 
 been missed, and was found on his person. He 
 was bound tightly with thongs, and thrown into 
 a shed by himself. 
 
 80 
 
In Hispaniola 
 
 This time, as he lay in the darkness, he 
 seemed to have no thoughts whatsoever ; 
 nothing but the swelling pain and the throb 
 of his tightened-down arteries, hour after hour. 
 Suddenly a hand passed groping over his face 
 and over his thongs. A few quick cuts, and 
 he staggered up. When his cramped limbs 
 could move, a hand led him through the dark 
 clearing into the forest, and the dawn showed 
 him a hideously emaciated Indian woman, and 
 a no less emaciated child of six or seven. What 
 her motive had been in cutting his thongs he 
 never discovered, as they had no common 
 language ; but she shared with him freely the 
 small provision of food that she carried ; and 
 when that was exhausted, she showed extra- 
 ordinary ingenuity in providing more from trees 
 and plants that he would never have found by 
 himself. He on his side helped her by carrying 
 the child when it seemed to be dying and could 
 tramp no more through the bush. Whither 
 they were bound he neither knew nor could ask. 
 And day after day they toiled on, till one 
 
 81 F 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 evening at sunset she suddenly stopped, and 
 placing in his hand a little leaf-wrapped packet 
 tied with plaited grass, pointed through the 
 trees of the ridge on which they stood, at the 
 sea and human dwellings far away at their 
 feet. He gazed long at the bright blue 
 expanse. When again he turned round, the 
 woman and the child had disappeared in the 
 forest. 
 
 The packet contained five small nuggets of 
 red virgin gold, which later served him in good 
 stead. He made his way down to the little 
 port. Three ships lay there at anchor amid 
 other craft, while boats plied continually 
 between them and the shore. They were the 
 ships of Don Luis, who, with the help of 
 the Governor, was completing his armament 
 and enlisting new men for his voyage in the 
 waters beyond. Later Juan, standing on the 
 wharf in the crowd of sailors, of semi-starved 
 Indians, of newly landed negroes, of armed buff- 
 booted planters, of white-and-black Dominicans, 
 distinctly recognised on one of the ships the 
 
 82 
 
In Hispaniola 
 
 Seeker of Youth, and Diego Perez, and Eosita 
 herself. But whether she would have known 
 him again as he stood there, is doubtful enough ; 
 for surely he himself would never have 
 recognised his face in a mirror. 
 
 83 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 BECALMED 
 
 Two months later, the largest of these same 
 ships lay in the unknown ocean, leagues and 
 leagues beyond Hispaniola, becalmed and 
 motionless. It was the nineteenth day since 
 her sails, like the wrings of an exhausted bird, 
 had flapped their last, and dropped limp and 
 useless. Before the calm had set in, she had 
 parted company with the two other vessels 
 that made up the little squadron. The white- 
 hot sun had, as one of the sailors expressed 
 it, stewed the sea to syrup, and so thick that 
 the ship, enclosed in sticky coils, stuck like 
 a spoon that stands of itself. The water in 
 the tanks was ebbing steadily away, and the 
 
 84 
 
Becalmed 
 
 hand of death seemed to be tightening round 
 the parching throats of the crew, who were 
 beginning to mutter that the curse of God 
 was upon them. For even before the present 
 horrible drought and immobility, and while 
 the vessel was still cleaving the unknown 
 waves, the superstitious reluctance of the 
 sailors nad begun to make them see strange 
 sights and dreadful omens. Skeletons had 
 swum one evening like sharks in the wake of 
 the ship. One of the crew had given the 
 alarm. He had seen the first of them raise 
 his long white arm above the water. It was 
 when the sun was almost on a level with the 
 wave. A blood-red glare had been suddenly 
 thrown on the sea under the lurid orb, just 
 like the crimson flaof that is thrown under the 
 wild eye of the bull in the arena. Then the 
 whole sea had glowed like a pool of newly- 
 shed gore ; and one by one they had seen, 
 or thought they had seen, the skulls and 
 arm -bones cresting every wave behind the 
 ship as far as eye could reach, until all the 
 
 85 
 
The Komance of the Fountam 
 
 countless dead who lie unburied in the depths 
 of the ocean, had risen to the surface 
 and given chase. But the ship had out-sailed 
 them. 
 
 Then there had been that great white fog 
 off Cape Cardozo, when they had seen the 
 giants, towering above the mast by head and 
 shoulders, and looming like monstrous shadows 
 through the vapour, now lighter and now 
 darker, as they waded further or nearer round 
 the ship. But luckily the fog had thickened 
 and hidden the vessel ; for if one of them 
 had cauo^ht sight of it, he would doubtless 
 have plucked it out of the water by the 
 mast, and whirled it like a sling round his 
 head. 
 
 But the worst of all had been the Wind of 
 Whispers, that blew for three whole days in 
 despite of prayer, of exorcism, of holy water, 
 saying to each man a different thing of horror 
 in his own mother's voice, as if from a great 
 distance. To one it had said nine times 
 distinctly : "I can see thee sinking through 
 
 86 
 
 I 
 
Becalmed 
 
 a hundred fathoms ; and fish swim after 
 thee." 
 
 And now they were sticking motionless in 
 the measureless ocean with never a breath to 
 sway the white dangling sails, or make a 
 ripple on its thickening surface. By-and-by 
 the moon would come and have her stare at 
 them, and turn the fetid sea into a Satan's 
 mirror. And then the water - witches would 
 rise up and swim round the vessel, even as 
 they had for many a night, croaking their 
 song of death. They came so close that some 
 of the sailors swore they could see the wrinkles 
 on their cheeks and on their knotty fingers. 
 The sea-hags had swum their dance the night 
 before in all their numbers : there must have 
 been a hundred of them in the reel. Their 
 hair was old grey sea-weed, and each of them 
 wore a necklace of drowned men's teeth. 
 They had once been young and beautiful — 
 the whitest of the mermaids. But they had 
 betrayed the secret of the ocean treasure, so 
 they had been stricken old and cursed for 
 
 ^ 87 
 
The Eomance of the Fountain 
 
 ever. And now they wrought the horror of 
 the sea, and stirred up tempests with their 
 songs and their spells. Did not every sailor 
 know, that down in their green and slimy 
 caves, they spun the thread of every ship's 
 voyage, and when they cut the thread it went 
 down ? Was it not they who, with a twirl of the 
 thumb, set the towering water-spouts rotating, 
 that overwhelmed ships and crews ; and who, 
 with a touch of the finger, made a ship spring 
 a leak that no pumps could keep down ? And 
 were the whirlpools of ocean not born of the 
 great reels that they danced in the depths, 
 faster and ever faster? And now was it not 
 they who had becalmed the ship, till perhaps 
 the crew would have to drink of each other's 
 veins, and thirst would end in madness and 
 laughter, in dancing and death ? . . . Look ; 
 the moon is cropping up on the horizon, as 
 round as a silver dish. And, l)y gum ! there 
 are the hags already. Look, yonder in the 
 moonshine, one of them is rolliug like a 
 porpoise. And now, look, look — a second and 
 
 88 
 
Becalmed . 
 
 a third. Ho, ho, the lewd old sea-maids ! . . . 
 How they gambol ! And the men of the 
 midnight watches would see them in their 
 multitudes form their great circle round the 
 shi^), and would hear their weird singing, 
 prophetic of the mischief of the sea. 
 
 And even as they had suddenly risen up, so 
 the water-witches, after a while, would dis- 
 appear as suddenly again into the depths. 
 
 " What art thou looking at so hard, now 
 that the sea-hags are gone ? " said one of the 
 sailors to his mate a little ''"ter. "Answer: 
 what art thou staring at ? " 
 
 '' Look just a little to the left of the moon, 
 on the water-line. Dost thou not see some- 
 thing?" replied the other. 
 
 " It looks like an island. Very strange. It 
 was not there half an hour ago," said the first 
 man. " It has three peaks, with the valleys 
 clear between them. It isn't twenty miles off. 
 We must have drifted with an unfelt current. 
 Call Sanchez. Where's the Commander?" 
 
 89 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 " In his cabin, deep in thought," rejoined 
 his companion. 
 
 " Thinking how to get us a little water for 
 our crackins: throats ? " 
 
 " Yes ; from the Fount of Y^outh." 
 
 90 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 MOON-SHADOWS 
 
 In the dark shadow which the useless tackle 
 of the becalmed ship threw on the moonlit 
 deck, a man stood, shunning observation. Juan 
 de Alvareda was impatiently watching the few 
 sailors who still lingered on deck go down one 
 by one, till only the lookout remained at the 
 other end of the vessel. Would she never 
 come ? he thought. But she was right to be 
 prudent ; for the danger to both of them was 
 great. How she had started that day when, 
 after they had weighed anchor at Hispaniola, 
 her eyes, looking vaguely round her, had 
 suddenly met his, and had recognised him 
 under his disguise ! The Chief Captain's eye 
 
 91 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 had fastened on her with a quick suspicion, 
 and he, Juan, had thought all lost. Would 
 he be able through the rest of the voyage to 
 keep his face, his gestures, his tongue, in the 
 control which his part exacted ? Would he be 
 able to check his rage when he should hear 
 the officers and men speak rashly of her 
 beauty, or see them fix their lock's of hungry 
 insolence on her face ? Had he not heard, 
 that very day, two sailors call her the destined 
 prize of the Chief Captain? And had his 
 knife not almost leapt of itself out of his 
 sash ? And she, could she control her glorious 
 eyes, and meet him twenty times a day, and 
 never so much as give him one quick look 
 for other eyes to catch? Oh, who could 
 measure the danger of the part they had to 
 play ? And yet how else, if he was to protect 
 her from perils still more threatening which 
 the folly of her mad dreamer of a father was 
 about to plunge her into, in unknown lands, 
 in his great search for Youth? How else, 
 how else, if he was ever to win that truer 
 
 92 
 
Moon-Shadows 
 
 Fount of Youth and loveliness wMcli sparkled 
 in her eyes, and rippled over in light waves 
 of magic when she spoke, — that truer, brighter 
 Fount from which his soul had taken such 
 delicious draughts? How old the world would 
 seem to him without it! ho*./ cold and dull 
 all earthly things would become ! . . . But 
 there she came, threading her way through 
 the tackle, keeping to the shadows. . . . 
 
 " I couldn't sleep for thinking of the peril 
 you're in," said Rosita in the lowest of whispers. 
 " Your life hangs on a thread." 
 
 *^ Were this a time for conceits," he answered, 
 " I should say the thread of gold that fastens 
 it to yours. The danger is less than you 
 think." 
 
 " If you were recognised in this disguise, no 
 help on earth could save you." 
 
 " We'll control our eyes. Why, I'd wrap the 
 cloak of peril seven times round me, if I wore 
 it as your livery." 
 
 " I wish you were not here." 
 
 "Did you think," he asked, "that I could 
 
 93 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 stay behind, and let you face all the treachery 
 of the Ocean, on the way to unknown lands, 
 and not watch over you ? Did you think I 
 could remain in Spain, while you were seeking 
 a frightful country, in whose forests the Indian 
 and the tiger will make friends to meet a 
 white invader? Oh, not I. Your father is 
 taking you to lands whose dreadful breath will 
 kill the roses on your cheek, whose heat will 
 scorch all the dewdrops of your gladness. In 
 his mad search for his own lost youth, he is 
 sacrificing yours." 
 
 " Alas, I know it," she answered. 
 
 *' Before we set sail from Spain," he said, 
 ^' I had a plan, as you know, to save you from 
 the mad folly of a dreamer, and carry you 
 away ; but accident prevented. One day, 
 though, I mean to do it yet, when chance 
 befriends me, and bear you back to Europe." 
 
 " I can only answer as I answered in Spain," 
 she said sadly. " I cannot do it. Did you not 
 say this very moment that we are sailing for 
 pestilential regions? Who will nurse him, 
 
 94 
 
Moon-Shadows 
 
 should he sicken when he gets there? I am 
 the only thing he loves." 
 
 " He has no love but the Fountain of Youth," 
 said Juan. 
 
 "Yes, but of living things, I am the one 
 he loves best." 
 
 "And loving you the less of the two, do 
 you think I will let him step between yourself 
 and me, and rob me of my love ? " 
 
 " Another shadow than his may step between 
 us," Rosita said gravely. 
 
 "How another?" 
 
 "Two nights ago," she answered, "I had 
 a dream of death." 
 
 " Oh, my love ! " he cried. 
 
 "Ay, a dream of death," she repeated. 
 " I was standing alone in an immense cave 
 temple, whose thick-set pillars, hewn out of 
 the solid rock, supported a heavy vault, that 
 seemed to crush out the spirit. The lurid 
 flicker of countless torches danced on the stone. 
 But all was empty. Suddenly a clash as of 
 a thousand cymbals shook the vault; and 
 
 95 
 
The Komance of the Fountain 
 
 starting out of the shadow, innumerable dusky 
 warriors enclosed me in the horror of a dizzy 
 war-dance, with guttural cries that grew ever 
 louder — the hideous circle of painted demons 
 closing ever nearer round me, brandishing 
 their javelins, while I stood and trembled in 
 the frightful centre ; until at last they reached 
 and overwhelmed me beneath their numbers. 
 Then, blindfolded, they led me through the 
 endless echoing caverns, chanting in an 
 unknown language w^hich somehow I could 
 understand, a measured chant of * Lo, the 
 Victim ! — We bring her to the Goddess, the 
 Destroyer. We bring her to the Murdering 
 Beauty, the Flower of Cruelty, the Wonderful 
 Executioner of Nature.' And as we wound 
 along in a slow procession with measured tramp, 
 a strange narcotic odour, at once delicious 
 and terrible, grew stronger and stronger, 
 till it was as intolerable as pain. Then 
 we halted, and I heard them cry in a pealing 
 voice, * Now lay her in the lap of the Great 
 Merciless.' And then they raised me as if 
 
 96 
 
 i 
 
Moon-Shadows 
 
 upon an altar, while strange snake-like coils, 
 which were not snakes, but which felt like 
 fleshy thongs, wound round and round my 
 throat, round and round my limbs and body, 
 elastic and irresistible. I felt my body 
 changing into pulp ; and in the middle of 
 the monstrous agony I woke." 
 
 " A hideous and most horrible dream," said 
 Juan with a shudder. 
 
 " What do you suppose the murderous 
 goddess was ? " asked Eosita. 
 
 " I think it was an empty fear — the 
 strangling goddess we call Nightmare," he 
 answered, "born of this frightful leaden 
 heat." 
 
 But Eosita shook her head. 
 
 " Love, I think not," she said. " I think it 
 was a presage of something in the future ; 
 a foresight of a fate that awaits me out 
 there." 
 
 " Whatever it is, it shall be kissed away — — 
 But, hush ! I see Diego Perez there in the 
 moonlight; and he must not find us so near 
 
 97 Q 
 
The Romance of the Fouiitam 
 
 together. Every time I see him fix his 
 eyes on you, it sets my fingers playing with 
 my knife. Slip back into your cabin. He 
 
 must not come upon us here " 
 
 And each separately disappeared among 
 the cross shadows of the moonlit rigginof. 
 
 98 
 
 I 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 ship's talk 
 
 Although the shadowy and elusive islands 
 that had loomed for so many centuries far 
 away on the western horizon, had recently 
 consolidated into the very real possession of 
 Hispaniola and its neighbouring regions, the 
 West was still the realm of the fabulous, the 
 chosen seat of all that men could conceive in 
 the way of the wonderful ; while beyond what 
 had been found, lay the still unfound, full 
 of the marvellous, the terrible, and the super- 
 natural. It was not strange, therefore, that 
 even the officers of Don Luis, in the Ions 
 monotonous hours when the ship lay becalmed, 
 allowed their imagination to weave every sort 
 of wonder with respect to the unknown country 
 
 99 
 
The Eomance of the Fountain 
 
 that lay before them, and its unknown 
 inhabitants. Some said that they were giants, 
 others that they were dwarfs. According to 
 one, the people of Bimini were amphibious ; 
 their cities were built in lakes and paved with 
 dark-green water, like oozy Venice. They 
 could stayjfor hours at the bottom like otters, 
 then rise up suddenly and shoot a flight of 
 arrows, and dive once more to the bottom. 
 According to another, they lived like rabbits 
 in subterranean burrows, with unseen issues ; 
 and often all of a sudden, in the desert, armies 
 would start up from cities that were unsuspected 
 underfoot, then vanish as unexpectedly, leaving 
 the landscape bare. Morasquez, the second 
 mate, had heard that their cities stood on 
 gigantic trees, high overhead ; each forest a 
 city, high in the sky. They wore their hair 
 in one long black rope, that huug down their 
 back ; and when their fathers died, they mourned 
 in yellow. But here he was corrected by 
 Garcia, another of the officers. It was the 
 Chineses of Cathay that wore the pigtails and 
 
 100 
 

 Ship's Talk 
 
 mourned in yellow. The Biminians mourned in 
 black, like Christians. And this led to the 
 question of their religion. One said that they 
 worshipped fire, and one that they worshipped 
 their own souls. And yet another had known 
 a monk at Cadiz, who said that they were 
 Nestorians, worse than any Jews or Moslems. 
 
 '* Thou art wrong," said Cucheres, the captain 
 of the pikemen. '' I met an Indian at 
 Hispaniola whose brother was once wrecked 
 on their coast ; and therefore I know for certain 
 what they worship. They have as their goddess 
 a terrific flower — a sort of Venus's fly-trap — 
 which is so gigantic that it can eat a man 
 with as much ease as ours can eat a fly ; and 
 they feed it with a slave once a day." 
 
 ''The thing may be," said Sanchez, the one 
 he had interrupted, '' for things as strange have 
 been known. But, on the whole, it is more 
 likely that they are Nestorians, or heretics of 
 some sort. This much is clear, that whatever 
 their faith may be, it must be rooted out, as is 
 being done in Guatemala. They use blood- 
 
 101 
 
Tlie Soma;nce of the Fountain 
 
 hounds there. Balboa has them trained with 
 figures in human shape made of wicker and 
 filled with carrion. Each hound is entered on 
 the army list, and gets a soldier's pay. Balboa 
 says that if the Indians can now understand 
 the doctrine of the Trinity, it is thanks to 
 those hounds of his. He calls them his con- 
 fessors." 
 
 "Pity we can't use them at home to teach 
 the Moors their prayers," said a soldier of the 
 name of Carpaza ; " a year or two, and they 
 would be good Christians. What say'st thou, 
 Sanchez ? " 
 
 " Ay," answered the one so addressed, '* a 
 pity indeed. The King is too soft-hearted. He 
 should have rooted their cursed religion out 
 of Spain when he and Queen Isabel took 
 Granada." 
 
 As he spoke, the cabin door opened, and the 
 cynical face of Diego Perez appeared in its 
 shadow. 
 
 ** Talking of the Moslem ? " he asked. 
 
 102 
 
Ship's Talk 
 
 "Yes, and how to treat them," answered 
 Morasquez. 
 
 " Shall I tell you ? " said the Chief Captain. 
 *' I've had some little experience of the Infidels ; 
 and I've never told you of the bonfire I set 
 blazing in the Arabian Sea when I served the 
 Portuguese under Vasco." 
 
 They all gathered round him. 
 
 " We had rounded the Cape of Storms," Perez 
 began, " right away to Muscat and the coast 
 of Ind. And we had bombarded town after 
 town along the coasts, filling up our ships with 
 pillage as no ships were ever filled before ; 
 crazing every turbaned head with an unknown 
 thunder, till every gemmed and sooty Sultan 
 trembled in his yellow shoes, from Gomorro 
 to Ganza. 
 
 " One day we sighted a Moslem sail, and 
 pounced upon it like a hawk on the quarry. 
 They turned out to be pilgrims bound for 
 Mecca, sailing slowly in a large and heavy 
 vessel. They were as crowded as nestling 
 
 103 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 insects. Vasco cried out : ' I know their 
 turbans. They're Arab vermin, every one. 
 We must board her.' 
 
 " But it was no easy matter, for every devil 
 of them fought for his life like a dozen. 
 However, when it came to the end, not a man 
 was left alive. Vasco saw to that. 
 
 '* But the women and children still remained 
 on the ship, waiting the Admiral's pleasure. 
 And Vasco said : ' I've no room for the women ; 
 but we can keep and christen twenty of the 
 children.' And he bade me select them before 
 nightfall. So I took a boat and chose twenty 
 little Arabs, and packed them in it tight. And 
 as I was about to leave the ship and row back 
 to my own, I debated in my mind whether 
 to fire her or let her float. Better fire her, I 
 thought ; she'll serve to light us back. If any 
 of the women find it hot, they can jump into 
 the sea. So I lit a fuse, and threw it into the 
 dry tackle, where the rising night breeze fanned 
 it gently, and we rowed away. 
 
 104 
 
Ship's Talk 
 
 "When we had got to a safe distance, we 
 lay on our oars where the ship, when she 
 should settle, could not suck us down with 
 her; and there in the gathering night we 
 waited. 
 
 " Suddenly a pinnacle of fire shot up dazzling 
 white from the sea to the sky. Then all grew 
 red, and for miles the water round the ship 
 grew lurid and as vivid as day. 
 
 "As we sat and watched in the ever- 
 increasing radiance, we saw something come 
 swimming from the flaming ship — something 
 that might be man, or might be beast. Glow- 
 ing ashes were sputtering round it, like a rain 
 of bright-red blood ; by glimpses we could see 
 its head struggling towards us through a quarter 
 of a mile of crimson water. Then we saw that 
 it was a woman carrying a child on her back. 
 How we laughed ! * By the Gospel,' we said, 
 * it's another little Moslem to baptize : its 
 mother is bringing it herself. . . .' We could 
 see the little head by the side of the big one, 
 
 105 
 
The Romance of the Foiintain 
 
 bobbing, bobbing, bobbing : it was the funniest 
 thing in the world. And as we laughed we 
 shouted, * Swim and save it from damnation ! 
 Well swum, well swum ! ' And as we watched 
 her we betted on her progress, wondering 
 whether she would reach us or not. We 
 could see that she was getting more exhausted 
 every minute. But, by the Lord ! she managed 
 to get to us, while her gurgling shouts grew 
 wilder and wilder, beseeching us in her lingo 
 to save her little infidel. So we took it from 
 her as she grappled to the gunwale ; and I 
 rolled her back into the sea with a handspike 
 in her throat." 
 
 A man had entered the cabin unnoticed, in 
 time to hear the end of the story. 
 
 ** Thou art a base coward," he said, for all 
 to hear. 
 
 "Ha, what's that?" cried the other. "Say 
 
 it agam- 
 
 )» 
 
 " Thou art a vile, base coward," repeated 
 the newcomer. 
 
 106 
 
Ship's Talk 
 
 Like a tiger that gathers itself up, Diego 
 Perez sprang at him with his dagger. 
 
 ^*Take that!" he cried. 
 
 But Juan de Alvareda — for he it was — was 
 no less quick. He caught his assailant's wrist, 
 and averted the blow as it fell. Then they 
 rolled together on the floor, over and over. 
 In another moment Juan had wrenched the 
 weapon out of the other's hand, and was 
 holding it at his throat. 
 
 ** Shall I drive it in?" he panted. *' There, 
 keep thy dog's life ; I make thee a present of 
 it. But stick no more handspikes in women's 
 throats." 
 
 And the others, recovering from the sudden- 
 ness of the brawl, separated the two. 
 
 107 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 TBE WATER IN THE TANKS 
 
 Another day had gone by. The Commander, 
 as we must now call Don Luis, Tvas walking 
 up and down his cabin, stopping every now 
 and then to gaze wistfully through the port- 
 hole at the heavens and the sea. At last, at 
 last, the fixed complexion of the sky was 
 giving way. There were omens of a change. 
 And well indeed there mio-ht. It was the 
 twentieth day of the calm. He had begun 
 to think that the vessel, planted in stagnant 
 brine, had struck root, and was tethered for 
 ever to that one spot of sea. Oh, with what 
 thirst, during those three weeks of w^aiting, 
 
 108 
 
The Water in the Tanks 
 
 had he panted ! — Not for the base and un- 
 vivifying water for which the others were 
 yearning ; but for the magic rill, the trickling 
 diamond, that was his constant thought by 
 day and by night. Did not each fretful hour 
 of new delay and of baflBed expectation, that 
 trifled with the vast longing of his heart, 
 add threads of silver to his rapidly-whitening 
 beard? Last night there had been a change 
 in the aspect of the moon. The catspaw was 
 at hand. The wind would rise to - night, 
 and then they would unfurl the sails once 
 more. 
 
 As he turned from the port-hole and resumed 
 his walk, his face had again the light of mystic 
 hope upon it. Then his brow contracted, as a 
 thought struck him. What about Fernandez* 
 ship and the other? His mind misgave him 
 at their disappearance. It was nearly a month 
 since they had parted company. What if 
 Fernandez were to reach the goal before 
 himself, and, being the first to land, should 
 
 109 
 
The Komance of the Fountain 
 
 make a private treaty with the immortal 
 kins:? He thouo;ht him treacherous enouorh 
 for that. 
 
 There was a knock at the door, and Diego 
 Perez entered. 
 
 " There is a change," said his chief. 
 
 " I know it," answered the lieutenant with 
 a grim smile. " Have I not had my eyes 
 fastened for half the night on the moon and 
 on the faint vapours that have formed on the 
 horizon? Yes, there's a change. I have 
 already given all the necessary orders. The 
 men are ready ; and within twelve hours we 
 shall be able to unfurl the sails to the wind 
 and turn the helm . . . back upon Hispaniola." 
 
 " Hell and thunder ! " cried the Commander, 
 with a start that upset the maps and instru- 
 ments on the table. " What dost thou 
 mean f 
 
 " I mean," said Diego with a sinister 
 composure, " that there is water enough in 
 the tanks — and that barely — to take us back 
 
 110 
 
The Water in the Tanks 
 
 to Hispaniola; but not half the quantity that 
 is needed to take us to our destination." 
 
 Don Luis's face was as white as the papers 
 that littered the table. 
 
 ** Say it slower," he said in a stiff, soundless 
 voice; "say it again. Say I have heard thee 
 wrong. It cannot be. God, it cannot 
 be ! Say thou didst not say to me ' Turn 
 back.' " 
 
 "It is not I who say it," said the other, 
 " but the tanks. Come and inspect them for 
 yourself." 
 
 " Back to Hispaniola for the want of a few 
 
 paltry gallons of fresh water ? It cannot be. 
 
 The thought is mad and monstrous. Why, it 
 
 would mean at least a year of wasted plans, 
 
 of wasted effort. What am I saying ? Why, 
 
 it would mean the end of the whole enterprise. 
 
 For who would get this mutinous crew to sail 
 
 again ? I say it cannot be. It is a nightmare 
 
 of thy dreaming. . . . And while we turn our 
 
 backs upon the priceless goal, Fernandez, with 
 
 111 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 the other ships, will reach it, and I shall be 
 cheated of the object of my life." 
 
 " There is no arguing with parched and 
 cracking throats," answered Perez. " Do you 
 think you can quench a sailor's raging thirst 
 by talking of the Fount of Youth ? Come 
 and inspect the tanks." 
 
 The Commander passed his hand across his 
 white brow and draw^n face. 
 
 "It may rain," he said. "The clouds are 
 gathering on the horizon." 
 
 But the Chief Captain shook his head with 
 an ugly laugh. 
 
 " I know these seas," he retorted. " Have 
 I not sailed them before at this season ? The 
 wdnd is at hand, but not a drop of rain." 
 
 The other strode up and down the cabin. 
 
 " What ! " he cried, and his voice broke into 
 a sob, "to be cheated of the Fount of Founts, 
 of that potent and ineffable draught, for the 
 lack of some few gallons of such w^ater as any 
 dog can lap in the street? The thought w411 
 
 112 
 
The Water in the Tanks 
 
 drive me mad. Eather than turn, I'll blow 
 up the ship and all it contains, and my own 
 self with it." 
 
 "The thought is very kind," said his 
 lieutenant with another and louder laugh, 
 more insolent than before ; " but as it happens 
 that the crew, and I myself, have no such 
 violent objection to reach old age as you have, 
 I must beg you to put your powder to some 
 other use than sending us to Heaven. I have 
 told you how matters stand. The case is 
 very simple. You have but to compute the 
 gallons and compute the mouths." 
 
 He paused ; then fixing his eyes on his 
 chief : 
 
 " There are ways, however, of cutting 
 Gordian knots," he said, " which only old 
 adventurers of the sea like myself know of 
 and can practise. ..." 
 
 Don Luis started, and his breath stopped, 
 as he hung on the other's words. 
 
 " Now listen," Perez went on, his words 
 
 113 H 
 
The Romance of the Foimtam 
 
 dropping slowly one by one. " What would 
 you give me if, despite the ebbing tanks, I 
 were to lead you to your goal ? Weigh well 
 your answer." 
 
 "All save my own life," answered the 
 Commander ; '' all that I have and love." 
 
 " Even the promise of your daughter's hand 
 in marriage ? " 
 
 " Yes, even that," he said huskily. 
 
 " Well, if you give me that," said the other, 
 " and put me for twelve hours in undisputed 
 power on this ship, I take you to Bimini. 
 Do you swear ? " 
 
 "I swear it by the shrine of Compostella. 
 I know of nothing more sacred." 
 
 " I am satisfied," said Perez. " We under- 
 stand each other. And now I will leave you 
 to your meditations for a little, while I give 
 my orders. I would rather you remained 
 below. I shall not be Ions;." 
 
 And, saluting his superior, who had now 
 become his subordinate, he left the cabin. 
 
 114 
 
The Water in the Tanks 
 
 Don Luis's eyes followed him as he 
 disappeared ; then he clutched the edge of the 
 table, as though to steady himself. Was it a 
 sudden stagger that had left him dizzy ? or was 
 it only that his soul had stood for a few black 
 and icy minutes, shivering in the outer lobby of 
 Despair, and still felt numb, even by the 
 rekindled hearth of Hope ? 
 
 He shook himself, and in his soul two 
 voices sounded simultaneously, one loud and 
 triumphant, the other fainter but persistent. 
 "The Fount of Youth!" cried the one; ''thou 
 hast the Fount of Youth. Exult! Exult!" 
 "Thou hast sold her," cried the other. "Thou 
 hast sold her ! " 
 
 "Exult! Exult!" the first voice cried again. 
 " Who says thou hast sold her ? Have not 
 others, for baser goals, to crush out love and 
 conscience, mercy, happiness, health and 
 slumber — and all for a base god ? And dost 
 thou think that Youth, the Kadiant, the 
 Wondrous, will grant at less price the glory of 
 
 116 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 his Fountain ? Price ? Did I say price ? Who 
 talks of price, when what is sought is the 
 ineffable ? Is it not for her, for the child her- 
 self, that thou seekest the incomparable boon ? 
 Is it not that perennial youth may sit on her 
 cheek, that it may gleam in her eye, that thou 
 confrontest all these dangers ? Away with the 
 base thoughts that assail thee ! Away with 
 these human compunctions ! There can be but 
 exultation at her glory, delight at her ineffable 
 fortune. Exult ! Exult ! Thy daughter will be 
 as beautiful for ever ! " 
 
 And the second voice sounded no more. 
 
 Presently Diego Perez returned, and cut short 
 the rush of his thoughts. 
 
 ^'Already back?" said Don Luis. ''What 
 orders hast thou given in this half-hour of thy 
 omnipotence ? " 
 
 *' I will tell you," answered the Chief 
 Captain. "For these last two moonlit nights 
 the sailors have been watching a phantom 
 island on the distant horizon. It is a thing 
 
 116 
 
The Water in the Tanks 
 
 of unsubstantial haze and vapour — a freak of 
 light betokening a change of weather. I have 
 ordered a third of the men, under the charge of 
 a man called Juan — one of those we recruited 
 at Hispaniola — to leave the ship in two boats, 
 and await us there." 
 
 '' What, in a phantom island ! " cried the 
 other. "Art thou mad?" 
 
 '* Then, while they land upon it," went on 
 Perez, without heeding the interruption, " w^e 
 sail on. The crew, diminished by so many 
 mouths, and put on half rations of fresh water, 
 can reach Bimini in safety." 
 
 '* But, good God !" exclaimed the Commander, 
 his worn and pinched expression changing to 
 one of horror, " why, this is simple murder. 
 What I send out a third of the men in open 
 boats on this unsailed ocean to die of thirst, or 
 drink of the brine that maddens ! It is murder, 
 simple murder ! " 
 
 " If they only think sufficiently hard on sugar, 
 the brine won't taste of salt." 
 
 117 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 *' It can't be done," said Don Luis in an 
 appalled voice ; "I can't let such a monstrous 
 thing be done." 
 
 *'Tlie thing, monstrous or not, is done 
 already," answered Perez. 
 
 " Christ in Heaven ! " cried the other. 
 
 " The thing is done already," Perez repeated. 
 "They have left, and are now past recall. 
 Didn't you give me power of life and death 
 upon this ship ? I can now take you to Biraini, 
 — in return for the honour of your daughter's 
 hand." 
 
 '* Fountain of Youth," cried Don Luis, 
 covering his face with his hands, " what hast 
 thou made me do ? " 
 
 The Chief Captain looked at him with a 
 contemptuous smile. 
 
 " And so I turn his vanities to my profit," 
 he thought, "even as I shall do many a time in 
 future. I will build up my house on the misty 
 basis of his dreams, — the solid edifice of my real 
 power. While he is seeking the Fount of 
 
 118 
 
The Water in the Tanks 
 
 Youth, I will make the regions we conquer 
 mine. He has got a royal charter in his pocket. 
 But I, when once I am his son-in-law, will be 
 the real Viceroy, the master of the substance, 
 until such time as feeling strong enough to do 
 it, I shall deprive him even of the shadow of 
 his authority." 
 
 '^0 Fountain of Youth," cried Don Luis once 
 more, "what hast thou made me do?" 
 
 119 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE FLOWER 
 
 Meanwhile, in the mysterious kingdom of 
 Bimini, dusky myriads, unconscious of the 
 impending arrival of the strange steel- capped, 
 steel-breasted men with the white faces, who 
 were to shake the air with a new thunder, 
 were living their daily swarming life, even as 
 they had done for ages and ages, round the 
 great fane of a terrific and wonderful goddess. 
 
 It was an immense cave temple, carved 
 out of the living rock in the dim centuries 
 of their antiquity ; at once the centre and the 
 symbol of their civilisation. Its heavy vaults 
 and jointless walls, crushing to the spirit as 
 no others in the world, were covered with 
 
 120 
 
The Flower 
 
 dreadful pictures of the minor but not less 
 terrible divinities, powers, and demons, that 
 presided over the destinies of the race. To an 
 unknown depth, back into the rock, stretched 
 those mighty caves and their endless lines of 
 thickset pillars, and under them the deeper 
 crypts where the hidden rites of a dreadful 
 religion were practised, and where the captives 
 of war and the doomed slaves of peace were 
 kept for constant sacrifice. In the central 
 fane of the temple dwelt the blood-stained 
 goddess, whose bosom, when man was pressed 
 against it, meant death most horrible ; whose 
 loveliness was not human ; whose limbs were 
 not limbs of woman — the Virgin Deity of 
 Beauty and Destruction, whom her worshippers 
 called the Flower of Cruelty, the Scented 
 Throttler, the Wondrous Executioner of 
 Nature. 
 
 Terrific ? 
 
 She was more terrific than the great brazen 
 Moloch whose hands raised the infants of 
 
 - 121 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 Carthage to bis lipless metal mouth and 
 impassibly dropped them into his fiery maw. 
 
 Pitiless ? 
 
 She was more pitiless than the brass bull of 
 Phalaris, in whom bellowed the shadows that 
 loomed through his red-hot flanks. 
 
 Inscrutable ? 
 
 She was more inscrutable than the silent 
 Iron Virgin whose arms, lined with rows of 
 knives, closed on the captive in the mediaeval 
 dungeon, as he poured his prayers unsuspect- 
 ingly into her bosom. 
 
 Yea, and she was more monstrous than them 
 all, because of her infinite beauty. 
 
 She had once dwelt in the hot primeval 
 forest, ages and ages ago, before man had ever 
 knelt to her splendour or felt her hug of horror, 
 and when the blood that flecked her snowy 
 petals was not yet his own. In those days a 
 rippling streamlet ran through her grove with 
 a never-ceasing murmur. All the loveliness of 
 Nature surrounded her shrine ; ay, and all 
 
 122 
 
The Flower 
 
 Nature's cruelty ; and she was the goddess of 
 the one and of the other. Great lianas, 
 flowering for the wild bee and the humming- 
 bird, who passed over her like a flash of gold 
 or of azure, hung in festoons from^tree to tree, 
 where her heavy odours were distilled in the 
 noontide. The gaudy parrots clung to the 
 swinging garlands that enclosed her. Flower 
 and flaming feather vied in gorgeousness all 
 about her ; while the panther, with a boundless 
 hunger in his eyes, circled slowly and soundlessly 
 round her, warned by an instinct to approach 
 no nearer. Sometimes the lazy current of the 
 great constrictor would wind almost at her feet, 
 — the great constrictor, once her rival, but whom 
 she had long since surpassed in the art of squeez- 
 ing out the life in a silent irresistible vice. 
 
 Human flesh had never fed her ; nor as yet 
 had man learnt to fear her. Only if some 
 drowsy deer incautiously took its noonday sleep 
 within her reach, would her mighty tendrils 
 creep round it, draw it nearer and nearer, and 
 
 123 
 
The Romance of the Fouiitam 
 
 slowly squeeze out its convulsed and writhing 
 life in a flowery chasm ; or she would seize 
 some blue-faced ape with her ineluctable thongs, 
 or some guileless cockatoo would fly straight 
 into her bosom. 
 
 But at last man came within her reach ; and 
 the great terrific Flower, luring him by her 
 beauty, drowsing him by her narcotic 
 scents, drew him to her feet. Her resistless 
 tentacles grasped him, and his head sank on 
 the horror of her breast in an appalling 
 embrace. 
 
 Then her appetite for human flesh began ; 
 and man brought her of his best ; feeding her 
 with the limbs of his own kind ; giving her 
 worship and hymns and slave upon slave, 
 victim upon victim, while he watched her 
 tendrils crush the breath from the body, and 
 make the body into pulp. 
 
 And at length, having made her his goddess, 
 he placed her in the temple of Beauty and 
 Destruction, and fed her daily with a slave. 
 
 124 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE LANDING OF THE WHITES 
 
 Don Luis's ship, enabled by Perez' stratagem 
 to proceed on its way in spite of the exhausted 
 supply of fresh water in its tanks, made rapid 
 progress towards its goal ; caught up its 
 consorts, and at last, on a glorious evening, as 
 the sun, who had led them westwards for so 
 long, was sinking in all his splendour, as if 
 leaving them on the fulfilment of his task, 
 sighted the long wooded shores of the 
 mysterious land. A little later, the leader 
 of the expedition, springing on to the yellow 
 sandy beach, unfurled the standard of Aragon, 
 and bade the whole of his little army kneel 
 
 125 
 
The Romance of the Foimtam 
 
 round it while he rendered thanks for the 
 fulfilment of the dream of a lifetime. 
 
 " Soldiers of Youth," he said, rising from 
 his prayer to address them, " never before in 
 the history of Spain and of the world have 
 brave men landed on a foreign strand upon 
 so wonderful, so incredibly glorious an errand 
 as yours. For it is not gold, nor silver, nor 
 gems — though doubtless we shall find those 
 too — that you come to conquer in these 
 untrodden regions, but something infinitely 
 more precious ; something in exchange for 
 which the possessors of all the doubloons ever 
 coined, of all the jewels ever cut, would have 
 thrown them with scorn into the ocean. You 
 are here to find that inefiable Fount, that 
 bubbling, rippling Diamond, that men have 
 seen in tantalising dreams through centuries 
 of hope and fear, and that the world has 
 thirsted for till now with the thirst of thirsts, 
 the yearning of yearnings. If we find what 
 we seek — what we will die rather than lose — 
 
The Landing of the Whites 
 
 those of you who are still young this day will 
 keep their youth for ever; and those of you 
 who are old will look into each others* faces 
 and know each other not : for youth will sit 
 upon their brows radiant and victorious. But 
 I would not have you fancy that the enter- 
 prize is easy : that you have only to stretch 
 your hand to grasp the unspeakable boon. 
 Like all glorious exploits — nay, more than 
 all others — it will require your courage, your 
 patience, your devotion, your determination to 
 conquer or to die. The Fount is protected 
 by impenetrable forests and by innumerable 
 warriors. But, Soldiers of Youth, you will 
 overcome both. I have sworn to King 
 Ferdinand to bring him back the Draught 
 of Draughts, and with God's help I will do 
 it." 
 
 A deafening shout of assent greeted the 
 Commander's speech ; though whether the 
 prospect of miraculous rejuvenescence had as 
 much share in the men's enthusiasm as the 
 
 127 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 allusion to the gold and the jewels, is a 
 question that must remain more than doubtful. 
 
 By a lucky accident, the point of the coast 
 where they had cast anchor lay in a province 
 which had but recently been conquered and 
 added to the dominion of Bimini, and whose 
 people had just risen in rebellion. Scarce had 
 the little Spanish force landed, when dark 
 masses of armed natives were seen approaching, 
 who, so far from attacking it, showed every 
 sign of amity, and welcomed the unknown 
 invaders with open arms, almost as if they 
 had been expecting them. Gifts were 
 exchanged, and Don Luis found his effective 
 augmented, far sooner than he could have 
 hoped, by a strong auxiliary force of warlike 
 Indians, — tribes as brave as the Biminians 
 who had conquered them, and admirably 
 fitted, under European leadership, for the sort 
 of war he had to wage. 
 
 Though uniting the courage inherited from 
 a long line of warlike ancestors with the 
 
 128 
 
The Landing of the Whites 
 
 fearlessness of a fanatic, the leader of tlie 
 expedition had little of the special capacity 
 required for military command. But he 
 possessed in the person of Diego Perez one 
 of those terrible instruments of conquest of 
 which Spain furnished so many in that 
 century, — men who united baseness and 
 bravery, greed and military genius, cruelty 
 and indomitable will. And well it was for 
 the Spaniards that they were so commanded ; 
 for the interval that was granted them was 
 short. They had scarcely had time to rest 
 from the dangers and fatigues of the sea, 
 when all the forces of Bimini burst upon 
 their auxiliaries and themselves. A detailed 
 account of the Biminian campaign does not 
 fall within the scope of this book, and is not 
 required to develop the romance of the 
 Fountain. Suffice it to say that, blow upon 
 blow, victory upon victory, the army of the 
 Dreamer fought its way against fearful 
 numerical odds through the plain that lay 
 
 129 I 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 between the coast and the capital — even as 
 some of the men who composed it were 
 destined to do on a larger scale, not many 
 years later, in the realms of the Aztec kings 
 and the Incas. For what swarms of dusky 
 warriors, though as thick as the stars in the 
 sky, could stand against those terrible pike 
 and crossbowmen who had learnt their trade 
 in the campaigns of Granada, or in Italy 
 under the great Gonsalvo, and who were 
 supported by the irresistible fire-spitting tubes 
 that shook the air like the crashes of storm ? 
 
 Not only did the fire-arms of the invaders 
 reach them before they could get within 
 striking distance, but the poisoned arrows so 
 effective against the naked bodies of men of 
 their own dark race, glanced off the bright 
 steel plates of the Spaniards, or were cleaned 
 of their venom by the very leather they 
 pierced through. Thus it was the Indian 
 auxiliaries who, unprotected by armour or buff 
 coat, furnished the contingent of death. Their 
 
 130 
 
 ki 
 
The Landing of the Whites 
 
 losses mattered little : their ranks were renewed 
 as quickly as they fell ; and the white men 
 marched on, as if they had borne a charmed 
 life, to deal the decisive blow when the 
 Biminians had exhausted their arrows, and 
 had to fight hand to hand with the javelin. 
 
 Don Luis's original plan had been to gain 
 possession of the person of the Ever- Young 
 monarch, and then to exact the secret of the 
 Fountain as his ransom. But though the 
 Indian King lost battle on battle, and had 
 to fall back step by step on his capital, he 
 had not, so far, fallen into the hands of the 
 invader ; and the mystic Seeker of Youth was 
 forced to change his plan, and to trust to 
 negotiation and treaty for the fulfilment of 
 his hopes. So, when almost within sight of 
 the mysterious temple city, he stopped suddenly 
 on his onward march, and accepted proposals 
 of truce. And very welcome was the pause, 
 for the army urgently needed repose. 
 
 131 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 SUSPENSE 
 
 A MORE stable encampment than had yet been 
 possible was established on the margin of the 
 primeval forest along whose side the road of 
 the army lay. It was as beautiful and restful 
 a spot as had ever been selected for a camp. 
 The tents in their symmetrical rows were 
 shaded by trees of uncomputed age, and a 
 sound of cooling streamlets pervaded the 
 little canvas city. But Rosita, as the weeks 
 went by, though she profited by the physical 
 rest after the interminable march, during 
 which she had followed the army in a litter, 
 found no peace for her soul. She had been 
 told that the lost boats had been picked up, 
 
 132 
 
Suspense 
 
 and that part of their crews had been found 
 still alive. But she could not find out whether 
 Juan was among them, nor dared she enquire 
 with too great an insistence for fear of awaking 
 suspicion. The secret of the fool's errand on 
 which they had been sent was known only 
 to her father and to Diego Perez. Eosita 
 suspected the truth, and in her agony at 
 Juan's loss, had taxed her father with the 
 deed; but he had opposed to the charge an 
 obstinate denial. For the moment all com- 
 munication with the ships and the landing- 
 place was cut off; and she ate away her heart 
 in uncertainty. The Spaniards had brought 
 but few white women with them, and of 
 these all but herself had remained on the 
 ships. For her father had forced her to 
 accompany the army, that she might share 
 the first glorious draught. She was given an 
 Indian guard and a number of Indian girls as 
 attendants, with whom she wandered aimlessly 
 in the forest within sound of the camp bugles. 
 
 133 
 
The Komance of the Fountain 
 
 Meanwhile, her position was becoming more 
 and more intolerable. For Perez now made 
 no secret of his pretensions ; and though he 
 seemed to be in no great hurry to exact the 
 fulfilment of the promise that her father had 
 made him, she found it every day more difficult 
 to keep him at a distance. Her instinctive 
 loathing for the man grew in intensity the 
 more he forced his company upon her. As 
 Chief Captain, he shared her father's table, 
 and Rosita was daily obliged to endure the 
 insolent familiarity with which he now treated 
 his patron and superior, the covered contempt 
 he bestowed on him, and the yet more insolent 
 attentions which he paid to herself. Don Luis 
 knew but too well how entirely he was in 
 Perez's hands, and how absolutely the realisa- 
 tion of his hopes depended on his lieutenant's 
 experience and military capacity ; and though 
 every now and again a flame of hereditary 
 pride or of natural anger w^ould blaze out 
 when his base-born subordinate had gone a 
 
 134 
 
Suspense 
 
 step too far, lie was on the whole hopelessly 
 submissive. The more the inner voice which 
 he had stifled insisted on making itself heard, 
 and the more it reproached him with the 
 sacrifice of his daughter, the more obstinately 
 he tried to persuade himself that the whole 
 expedition had really been planned for her 
 sake, and that the immortalising of her youth 
 and rare beauty was the only goal of his life. 
 
 ''Take him as a husband?" she said to 
 her father one day ; " not while life is in my 
 body ! " 
 
 " You will change your mind when you know 
 him better, Rosita," he answered. " Eemember, 
 in this perilous enterprise I may be cut off 
 at any moment, cut off before reaching the 
 goal. And would you have me die with the 
 knowledge that I had not provided for your 
 safety ; that I had left you with no protector 
 in a camp of men like these ? " 
 
 "Never, never!" she repeated. "I would 
 rather mate with the tio;er of the forest. I 
 
 135 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 would rather be protected by the rattle-snake 
 and the cobra." 
 
 " You misjudge him," he said. 
 
 " I have taken his measure," she retorted. 
 
 *'In this world," her father went on, "every 
 great prize must be paid for ; and if an unspeak- 
 able glory requires as its price " 
 
 She stopped him with a look that his eyes 
 could not meet. 
 
 "Price?" she cried. "Price? Then you 
 admit " 
 
 " I admit nothing," he answered, as he turned 
 his back upon her. " You are as wilful as you 
 are blind to your own immense opportunity. 
 Think it over, and come to your senses." 
 
 Sometimes Rosita succeeded in escaping from 
 the guard which her father insisted on, and 
 would make her way by herself into the forest. 
 But such occasions were rare. Then she would 
 sit by herself at the root of some gigantic tree 
 of unknown name, weaving the dull imaginings 
 of uncertain evil, and accusing herself of all 
 
 136 
 
Suspense 
 
 that had happened. Why had she insisted on 
 sharing her father's folly, and accompanied 
 him across the dreadful ocean to this horrible 
 land, when Juan had implored her to elope? 
 Why had she brought danger and suffering 
 and perhaps death upon the man she loved, 
 and all this fear and all this misery upon 
 herself? How right Juan had been in his 
 forecast of misfortune ! Oh, if only she had 
 let him persuade her, and had fled with him 
 when he had urged her to do so! Danger? 
 Suffering ? Oh, there could be but one end to 
 it all, and that was surely death, for her 
 father, for her lover, for herself. But, no, 
 she could not have acted differently. She 
 must not let her soul regret the step she had 
 taken. She had done but her duty, and must 
 fight out her fate. 
 
 If only she knew if he was one of the men 
 saved. But how to find out, even if communica- 
 tions with the ships were open ? In whom could 
 she confide ? To whom could she give the com- 
 
 137 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 mission ? And even were he safe from the perils 
 of Nature, safe from the sea and the chances of 
 battle ; even were he here in the camp, would 
 he not be in hourly danger of death ? Would 
 he not be exposed to the implacable hatred and 
 treachery of Perez — things more dangerous than 
 the arrows of the Indians, than the fever of the 
 swamps ? 
 
 And, loathing her surroundings, she would 
 go over and over again with cruel vividness 
 the old days in Spain, when she had waited 
 in a wood of other trees and other mosses, 
 where Juan would show her the way to the 
 trysting-place by means of little signs cut in 
 the smooth bark. 
 
 But one morning, as she so sat, and looked 
 round her with a bitter smile of contrast, her 
 heart suddenly stopped in her bosom and 
 thumped at its walls as never before : for lo ! 
 on the tree in front of her, she saw that same 
 familiar sign fresh cut in the unfamiliar bark. 
 
 138 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 THE MEN IN THE BOATS 
 
 And now let us revert to the men who had 
 been sent out in open boats to die on an 
 unsailed ocean. 
 
 It is an old story, as old as navigation itself; 
 a story that you can read in the records of 
 every seafaring people and in every language ; 
 in every book of maritime adventure, and in 
 every history of discovery ; in the yellow folio 
 of some past century, and in the newspaper of 
 yesterday ; — a story that is being enacted on 
 some ocean or other at the very moment that 
 you are reading this page. Perhaps Odysseus 
 and his men, when they had left the Pillars 
 of Hercules far behind them, to disappear for 
 
 139 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 ever from the world and its history in the 
 mists of the Atlantic, enacted it as it will be 
 enacted next month by men who will look into 
 each other's faces with the old terrible surmise, 
 as the Sky says to them : ** For you I have 
 no rain"; and the Sun asks them: "Why 
 drink ye not the brine ? Is it not water ? " and 
 the Sea calls out to them in the silence : " For 
 you I have no shores. Come, leap into my 
 bosom. On my surface there are no ships to 
 save you, and in my depths there is no madness, 
 only death." 
 
 Through the endless hours they rowed, while 
 the great sun crossed the heavens above them 
 with snail-like slowness, and the island that 
 should have been upon the sea-line seemed to 
 have sunk into the deep. And then the moon 
 rose ; and lo ! the island was there : there as 
 distinct as their own faces. And again they 
 rowed on with their strength renewed by 
 hope and the coolness of night ; and the island 
 retreated before them ; and at dawn it had 
 
 140 
 
The Men in the Boats 
 
 again disappeared. And on and on, with the 
 scorching inexorable sun once more above their 
 heads, while the little fresh water they had 
 brought with them dwindled hour by hour. 
 And they knew that there was no help upon 
 the sea. 
 
 And their thirst grew and grew. 
 
 The ship had long since disappeared, none 
 knew in what direction. And on the third 
 morning, when Juan and his men looked round, 
 their companion boat was gone too. 
 
 And another great sun rose and crawled 
 through the sky above them. And their thirst 
 still grew and grew and grew. Juan ordered 
 the men to dip their limbs in turn in the water, 
 and let the skin absorb it, by which their thirst 
 was diminished. And if any of them were saved, 
 it was certainly owing to the expedient. But 
 when one of the men, and then a second, had 
 been pulled into the sea by a black rolling 
 shadow that eternally followed the boat, and 
 a red ring had bubbled up where the man had 
 
 141 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 disappeared, it had to be abandoned. Then 
 hunger came and joined in the game. Their 
 only hope lay in the ship's returning to seek 
 for them ; but in vain their eyes grew sore 
 with sweeping the horizon. Then Juan saw the 
 look in their faces change, and began to see 
 the strong looking at the weak with an ugly 
 pertinacity. And suddenly one of the men 
 began to sing a high, hysterical song, and 
 plunged over the stern and was seen no more. 
 And Juan watched one of them whose eyes 
 were fixed with horrible intentness on his 
 neighbour, and saw something that the others 
 did not see — something that told him that the 
 hour of the vampire was come. And drawing 
 his knife, he killed the man then and there, and 
 threw him overboard. And the others looked 
 on with indifi'erence ; but one muttered that he 
 should have kept him for food. 
 
 And then began the stage in which none 
 dare sleep, lest sleep should invite lethargy or 
 murder — a stage in which Juan still maintained 
 
 142 
 
The Men in the Boats 
 
 some control ; knowing well that the moment 
 when his power over the men should cease, 
 would be the signal for the last saturnalia of 
 horror. 
 
 And at last the rescuing ship was seen on 
 the horizon. But it was not that of Don Luis. 
 It was its consort, that of Fernandez, which had 
 parted company with it before the great 
 becalming. And what men were still alive 
 were lifted into it in their helplessness and 
 their delirium ; and Juan was one of them. 
 But it was a long while before he recovered 
 sufficient strength to join the force that was 
 fighting in the interior of the country and find 
 his way to the camp. 
 
 143 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 RENDEZVOUS IN THE FOREST 
 
 Juan and Eosita were resting on the moss in 
 the virgin forest at some little distance from 
 the Spanish tents. Above them were depths 
 of green — bough upon bough, and yet more 
 boughs above those. The tapering lichen- 
 patched columns of the trees, soaring up and 
 dividing, over-curved the gloom with ever 
 lighter, ever more delicate arches, tier upon tier ; 
 while the yellow sunlight, filtering through, 
 grew ever greener, till it found the moss on 
 which the two were lying. The beryl dome 
 which shrined their love might have been some 
 rare ocean cave, in whose green lights and 
 shadows during the glare of noon, the scaly 
 
 144 
 
Eendezvous in the Forest 
 
 and fantastic denizens of the deep, the ever- 
 escaping rapid Nereids and the enamoured 
 Tritons that pursue them, seek refuge when 
 the sun's darts strike most searchingly home. 
 Or was it all a dream, Juan thought; and he 
 called on her to assure him that the leaves 
 were real, and not the tantalising vision born 
 of raging thirst and the delirium of that open 
 boat on the leafless horror of the sea, where he 
 had lain among the dead and dying ; and that 
 she, who seemed to be leaning over him, was 
 not a phantom of that last awful hour, before 
 Fernandez's ship had picked up himself and 
 his mates, and taken them on to Bimini. 
 
 "Dear, dismiss your fears," said Eosita, the 
 smile of a sudden fancy breaking on her lips. 
 "You are no longer lying in the open boat, 
 dying of thirst; nor yet are you on land. 
 These are the green silent depths of the sea, 
 far below the cruel surface where reigns the 
 sea's mischief; and I am one of the mermaids 
 bending over you. When some comely young 
 
 146 K 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 sailor is drowned, we catch his body as it 
 sinks through the fathoms of green water, 
 and we wake him back with our spells and 
 our kisses to a deep-sea life." 
 
 *' The Queen of the Mermaids," he said, 
 smiling in answer to her smile ; " you must 
 not conceal your rank." 
 
 And as he looked at her face, the thought 
 struck him, that had she been indeed a 
 mermaid, she would have been so much more 
 beautiful than the others, that she could only 
 have been their sovereign or their victim ; and 
 the sea would have grown greener with jealousy. 
 
 "No; here in the sea- weed forests we are 
 all equal," Rosita said ; " and no discord or 
 spite or envy ever disturbs the calm green 
 depths. Sweet sailor, by-and-by I will take 
 you through the treasuries of the Ocean, and 
 show you the caves where we keep the sunken 
 gold and all the shipwrecked gems of the 
 world. There you will see coins minted by 
 forgotten kings ; sceptres of unremembered 
 
 146 
 
Eendezvous in the Forest 
 
 empires ; bar gold stored for unrealised con- 
 quest ; ingots that skeleton hands laid in 
 tribute at skeleton feet. There you will see 
 rubies that have dropped from the sunrise, 
 topazes that Evening has unstrung from her 
 necklace, and scattered broadcast on the sea ; 
 pearls that are made of the white gleamings 
 of the clouds. I will show you the lost galleys 
 of sea-demigods ; the argosies that were laden 
 with hope and with gems ; the argosies that 
 sailed into the fairy future and never 
 returned." 
 
 " And the richest of the treasuries is in a 
 certain mermaid's heart," he said. 
 
 '* We will live here together for ever," she 
 went on, continuing her fancy, " and see no 
 more of the earth, save some rare glimpse, 
 when we swim up and sit on some rock, where, 
 while I sing to my golden harp, or w^hile we 
 watch some lazy ship in the sunset, you will 
 repeat the merman vows that you made me. 
 Come, what will you say ? " 
 
 147 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 He might have told her that the pale green 
 light, which shines so softly in the happy 
 depths, was less to him than her love ; that 
 the slender stems that wave for ever in the 
 deep sea-caverns, were less supple than her 
 form ; that the pale rosy lining of the ocean 
 shells was dulled by the freshness of her 
 cheek, the coral by the crimson of her lips. 
 He might have told her that her voice was 
 sweeter than the ocean's summer breeze ; that 
 her kiss was softer than that of the sea-gull's 
 wing on the wave. All this was in the fashion 
 of their day. But he answered simply: "Ah, 
 Rosita, if only it were possible ! " 
 
 Again they looked up through the depths 
 of green. It was sweet to carry out the 
 fancy. 
 
 *' We would swim together," he said, 
 " through the old sea-cities that the ocean 
 hides in its heart — the old sea-cities whence, 
 ever and anon, the sound of bells rises up 
 suddenly for the belated fisherman in the 
 
 148 
 
Rendezvous in the Forest 
 
 twilight. There, where the hurry of life has 
 ended, we would swim hand in hand through 
 the empty halls, in and out between the 
 slimy columns, where the wonderful blooms 
 of the sea make living tapestries for dead 
 kings' palaces, and the shells make mosaics 
 for no human feet to tread : till we reached 
 the throne-room of Ocean. There I would 
 crown you queen. Ay, it is better to be 
 merman and mermaid." 
 
 " I would not be a daughter of earth," she 
 said slowly ; " earth is too full of care. I 
 would not leave my happy mermaid life." 
 
 "But if I were human," he said, ** would you 
 not forsake the sea to live with me on land, 
 and share with me the pain and the care, the 
 wistfulness, the regret?" 
 
 "The caves of Ocean," she answered, "are 
 green and are sweet ; the leaves of the sea-weed 
 forests fall not in autumn. But the streets of 
 your towns are paved with cares; your houses 
 are all tiled with woes ; the bitter bread that 
 
 149 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 men eat there is made of grain that Sorrow 
 sows while they sleep." 
 
 *' And you would sit on your rock," he said 
 reproachfully, " and watch the passing ships, 
 while the thought of me faded from your heart, 
 even as the sails faded in the distance ? " 
 
 " Love," she cried, throwing her arms round 
 him, " I would leave a thousand caves, a 
 thousand golden seas, to tread by your side 
 the earth's dusty paths, and share with you 
 their miserable burdens." 
 
 *' And we are together upon earth," he said — 
 " cruelly upon earth. love, it is time to 
 wake from the day-dream that has cheated us 
 both, here where the sound of your voice, 
 mixed with the whisper of the leaves, had 
 lulled my soul till I had half-forgotten what 
 brought me. Awake, awake. Emergency is 
 clamouring for an answer, and peril wraps us 
 round like a fiery girdle." 
 
 She looked at him pleadingly. 
 
 *' Oh, Juan," she murmured, '* I was so happy 
 
 150 
 
Eendezvous in the Forest 
 
 in my dream. May we not be a little 
 longer merman and mermaid in the pale green 
 sunlight, where the world with all its trouble, 
 its doubts, its hatreds, has no existence for 
 us?" 
 
 ''Would it were possible!" he answered. 
 "But danger presses. We must think and 
 act." 
 
 "You exaggerate the danger." 
 
 " I am no craven," he said, " for whom every 
 mole-hill shows the shadow of a toppling 
 mountain. But an urgent peril threatens us — 
 Diego Perez " 
 
 " I am not afraid of him," said Eosita. 
 
 " You don't know him," Juan went on. 
 " The most destructive wild beast that crouches 
 in these forests is kind compared with his 
 ferocity, and loyal when measured with his 
 treachery. He is your father's favourite and 
 his tyrant ; his daily evil genius ; and your 
 father, for som€ mysterious service past or 
 future, has promised him your hand. And 
 
 151 
 
The Komance of the Fountain 
 
 he is beginning to press for the fulfilment of 
 the bond." 
 
 ''He will find that he wastes his pains," 
 said the girl. 
 
 ''And when he does, and drops the mask," 
 replied Juan, ''the mask of love and courtship, 
 woe to yourself and to me. His soul writhes 
 under your scorn, and when fair means have 
 failed, he will use foul.'* 
 
 " I can defend myself," she said ; " his 
 violence does not frighten me." 
 
 " You don't know the danger you are in," 
 Juan rejoined. "If he were not the mean, 
 cruel coward, the unopposed tyrant that he 
 is — if I could cross blades with him in fair 
 fight, I would rid you of him soon enough. 
 But if I challenged him, do you suppose he 
 would meet me ? Before the day was out, I 
 should only have got myself throttled for my 
 pains. Listen. His insolence has bred dis- 
 content among the soldiers, whose lives are 
 being wasted in a vain, empty enterprise. 
 
 162 
 
Kendezvous in the Forest 
 
 Cucheres, Garcia, Morasquez, and some others, 
 have formed a plan to desert suddenly, seize 
 one of the ships, and sail back to Spain. We 
 must escape." 
 
 " I cannot leave my father," said Eosita. 
 
 ^*Tour life depends on it," Juan went on. 
 *'As for me, I owe your father nothing. Did 
 he not place me with others in an open boat, 
 to die of thirst on an unsailed ocean?" 
 
 "But I," said Rosita, "I owe him all — my 
 very breath, and many a kiss between the 
 eyes of childhood, when he used to hold me 
 on his knee, and when the Fount of Youth 
 was not, as it is now, the only thing he 
 loved." 
 
 Juan's brow darkened. 
 
 "Don't mention that hideous unreality," he 
 cried. " In his mad thirst for the enchanted 
 water that he will never reach on earth, he 
 plunges all who depend on him in ruin, and 
 will drag you into destruction with himself" 
 
 "The greater need," she answered, "that I, 
 
 153 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 who am the only true friend that remains, 
 should not desert him. Love, it cannot be." 
 
 " It must, it must ! " urged her lover. " There 
 is no time to lose. This opportunity once 
 missed, will never recur." 
 
 "I cannot leave my father," she said. "I 
 cannot leave him, even for you." 
 
 The faint sound of a clarion reached them 
 from the camp as she spoke. 
 
 "We must back to the tents," she cried, 
 springing to her feet — ''back by different ways. 
 Hasten, hasten, or you'll be missed. Every 
 kiss is a danger." 
 
 " We shall meet again to-morrow," he said, 
 turning reluctantly to go. " And I shall break 
 your purpose. Your life depends on it." 
 
 Kosita looked after him with anguish in her 
 eyes. Love was putting duty to the torture. 
 Would it stand the dreadful test ? It would 
 have to, she thought. But oh, it would have 
 been sweet to fly with him back to Spain ! 
 to see no more this wild and cruel Indian world 
 
 154 
 
Rendezvous in the Forest 
 
 of peril ; and with her hand in his, once more 
 to cross the rippling corn-fields where they used 
 to meet. But it could not be. She could not 
 abandon her father to his fate. No, no, it could 
 not be. She must stay beside him to the end. 
 
 165 
 
CHAPTEK XVII 
 
 MEETING OF FOES 
 
 In their clandestine relations, Juan and Rosita 
 had but two preoccupations. Since the very 
 first dawn of their love they had kept in 
 view two things, and two only — the hereditary 
 feud that divided their families, and the great 
 mad quest that had brought them where they 
 were. They could see only the implacable hate 
 that must needs lie in the heart of Don Luis for 
 any one bearing the name of Alvareda, and his 
 fanatical faith in the Fount. These two things 
 seemed to sum up the whole situation and to 
 govern the present and the future. But were 
 they right to take it so completely for granted ? 
 The name of Alvareda had indeed played a 
 
 156 
 
Meeting of Foes 
 
 terrible part in his ancestor's lives, and one 
 cruel enough in his own. Were there no other 
 elements in his character that they might have 
 remembered, no other motives to which to 
 appeal ? Were there no other strings in his soul 
 than ancestral and personal hatred, than the all- 
 sacrificing passion for the Fountain ? Was there 
 no generous impulse, no tender fatherly love, no 
 sense of justice and reason? If these things 
 were there, they could not see them in the light 
 of the man's fierce monomania ; nor did they 
 suspect the struggles that might all the time be 
 going on in his mystic irresolute heart. 
 
 If the Dreamer's dream was the cause of the 
 dangers and trials that beset them in these wild 
 lands of the West, it had at least the 
 compensating quality that it made him 
 singularly blind to their doings, and greatly 
 facilitated their meeting. And so they grew a 
 little careless regarding him. 
 
 Don Luis's visions were internal. He had 
 seen, for example, the sparkling object of his life 
 
 167 
 
The Komance of the Fountain 
 
 — whether Elixir or Fountain — in innumerable 
 shapes, each more dazzling than the last, with 
 the inner eyes of the spirit. But he w^as not 
 given to outer hallucinations. Yet one day he 
 had had one ; and singularly distinct it had 
 been, though it was only a glimpse through the 
 trees that surrounded the camp. He had seen, 
 in all her youth and her beauty, the wife he had 
 lost long, long years before. And w^ith her — 
 intolerable sight ! — was walking the man — he, 
 too, in his youth — who had dared to love her, 
 who had almost succeeded in snatching her out 
 of his arms on his wedding day, and through 
 years had heaped every wrong on the man he 
 had outraged. For one brief instant the sight 
 had staggered him. He had looked again, and 
 it was gone. It must surely have been a 
 passing fever of the brain. 
 
 He brooded over the incident. He asked 
 himself whether the woman he had seen had 
 not after all been Rosita — Rosita, w^ho was so 
 like what her mother had been at her age. But 
 
 168 
 
Meeting of Foes 
 
 the man ? What man had the features of his 
 enemy, such as his enemy had been years ago ? 
 No ; it must have been a delusion of the over- 
 wrought senses, perhaps brought on by the 
 work and the excitement of the campaign, by 
 the near realisation of his hopes. 
 
 Then there came another day, some weeks 
 later, when he again came on the couple : this 
 time face to face. And now he saw her 
 standing before him, Eosita his daughter — like 
 her dead mother certainly, but yet how unlike ! 
 And a man had his arm round her shoulder: 
 a man young and handsome, who might have 
 been Alvareda of old, and who wore the coarse 
 garb of one of the common soldiers of the 
 expedition. They started at the sight of the 
 Dreamer, and Rosita threw herself in front of 
 the younger man, as if to protect him from the 
 just wrath of her father. 
 
 A horrible thought struck Don Luis dumb 
 for a moment. His eyes measured the man 
 from head to foot. 
 
 169 
 
The Eomance of the Fountain 
 
 "What, with a common soldier?" he said at 
 last to his daughter ; " you, the child of the 
 Medranas ? " 
 
 " No, with an Alvareda," Juan answered for 
 Rosita, stepping forward and standing before 
 her father with a quiet pride that had nothing 
 of defiance. **You have reason to know the 
 name. I am the son of your implacable 
 enemy." 
 
 ''What has brought an Alvareda to my 
 standard?" Don Luis said after a pause. 
 
 " Love," the young man answered simply ; 
 " love. I came to protect your daughter : most 
 of all against yourself and your dreams." 
 
 " If ever love replaces the hate of centuries 
 between your race and mine, it shall not be this 
 sort of love." 
 
 " It is a love that has brought me no stain," 
 broke in Rosita. 
 
 Her father paid no heed to her words, but 
 seemed to see only Juan. 
 
 " You know that I have power of life and 
 
 160 
 
Meeting of Foes 
 
 death over all in this camp ? " he asked 
 grimly. 
 
 ** I know it," answered the other ; '^ and what 
 you will do, you will do. It would not be the 
 first time that a Medrana had taken the life of 
 an Alvareda, or an Alvareda that of a Medrana : 
 and neither is given to fear." 
 
 The Dreamer seemed to debate some question 
 with himself, the two keeping silent the w^hile. 
 
 " I know but one thing that an Alvareda can 
 claim from a Medrana besides death," he said 
 at last, lifting his plumed hat in the grand 
 Spanish manner to Juan, who returned the 
 salutation no less ceremoniously — " and that 
 is, the courtesy of a cavalier. I bow to the 
 son of my lifelong enemy. And now," he 
 added after a moment, with a long thoughtful 
 look at the young man, *' return to your 
 quarters, and there await my orders." And 
 taking his daughter by the hand, he led her 
 slowly away. 
 
 But when father and child were once more 
 
 161 L 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 alone together, there was no violence in the one, 
 there were no tears nor sobs in the other. He 
 had too much on his conscience, and she too 
 little on hers, for a stormy scene. Moreover, 
 being the mystic and the visionary he w^as, 
 this meeting face to face with the great hated 
 name, suddenly on the other side of the globe, 
 filled him with a sense of awe and of fate. It 
 seemed to him somehow to be the work of God. 
 The memory of his wife, who would have 
 pleaded for Eosita had she been there, and a 
 vague self-accusation with respect to past years, 
 disposed him to be just. He remembered how, 
 in the pursuit of his projects, he had left her to 
 herself, to the chances and dangers of a solitary 
 and neglected childhood ; and he knew that 
 if she could now look him fearlessly and proudly 
 in the face, it was no thanks to himself. 
 
 As for her, there was something like a sense 
 of relief in her heart. She w^as e:lad that the 
 period of intrigue and concealment was over. 
 She looked at her father, and said to herself 
 
 162 
 
Meeting of Foes 
 
 that her lover was perhaps in less peril, now 
 that he was known and in the old man's power. 
 
 ^' Father, I trust you," she said, looking up 
 into his eyes. ''When an Alvareda is at a 
 Medrana's mercy, he is safest." 
 
 Nor was she far wrong. He listened without 
 show of anger and with but little comment to 
 the story of her love, and of her meetings with 
 Juan in Spain and here in the Indies. 
 
 " Poor child," he said, " poor child ! " and laid 
 his hand gently on her head, as he had been 
 wont to do when she was little. 
 
 That night there was a tempest in the mystic 
 Seeker's soul. All the generosity, all the 
 courage that was in him, bade him respect the 
 same qualities in the son of his old enemy. 
 The unworthy suspicion that had passed like 
 an evil shadow over him for an instant, had 
 left no trace. His own honour refused to 
 challenge that of his daughter's lover, or retain 
 a doubt of her purity. His own troubled 
 conscience, when he remembered that he had 
 
 163 
 
The Romance of the Foimtain 
 
 sold her to Diego Perez, called on him to 
 compare the two men, and say which of them 
 was the fitter suitor, the fitter protector. He 
 had tried to cheat himself into the belief that a 
 marriage with his Chief Captain was necessary 
 for her safety in case of his own death ; and his 
 conscience gave him the lie. He could not 
 answer her. He dared not praise Perez when 
 she pleaded for Juan : Perez, that he knew in 
 his heart to be — what he was. All that was 
 noble within him called on him to close the 
 blood-feud of centuries by allowing the marriage 
 of a Medrana with an Alvareda, to choose 
 between his daughter's happiness and her 
 misery for life. 
 
 And the Fount of Youth ? 
 
 Its price was Kosita's hand. He knew that 
 he could never have reached Bimini without 
 the promise he had made. He knew that with- 
 out Diego Perez he would never drink the 
 draught. Perez was his indispensable captain, 
 his essential adviser, his master. How could he 
 
 164 
 
Meeting of Foes 
 
 break with him? How could he give her to 
 Juan ? 
 
 "The Fount of Youth, the Fount of 
 Youth. ..." 
 
 And so he did as weak men like himself have 
 ever done. He did as men in whose souls good 
 and evil feebly struggle have ever done and 
 ever will. He temporised and compromised, 
 and trusted to the future to unravel the knot. 
 And meanwhile he bade them wait and hope 
 and be patient, and sought to bind them to 
 secrecy, while he himself writhed in the grasp 
 of Diego Perez. 
 
 But Juan had little faith in his promises. 
 
 165 
 
CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 THE WOLF IN THE FLEECE 
 
 They were mistaken if they thought that 
 Rosita's father was the only power to be 
 reckoned with. 
 
 One day Rosita had met Juan at the usual 
 spot in the forest, and each had taken a 
 different path to return to the camp. The 
 girl was slowly making her way along the 
 mossy glades, when she started at the sight 
 of a figure approaching through the trees. 
 
 " What, alone ? " said Diego Perez — for he 
 it was — "alone, and without thy Indian guard? 
 Not even thy Indian handmaid ; and in this 
 forest, far beyond the sound of the camp 
 bugles ? Oh, this is rash ! " 
 
 166 
 
The Wolf in the Fleece 
 
 "You have been dogging me," Rosita 
 answered. " I don't care to be dogged." 
 
 " I saw thee leave the camp alone," he 
 rejoined, with an ugly smile, " and spurred 
 by love and fear for thy safety, I followed 
 in thy steps for thy protection." 
 Rosita laughed scornfully. 
 *'Does the roe require to be protected by 
 the skulking wolf?" she asked. 
 He did not seem to hear her taunt. 
 "The forest is unsafe," he resumed; "even 
 within sound of bugle. There are wild beasts 
 about." 
 
 " Yourself, for instance ? " 
 " Call me what thou wilt," he said, with 
 a frown that belied his attempt at a smile. 
 " Thou art fairest when thou callest me names. 
 Love is sweetest when he looks fiercest and 
 wears a lion's hide as a mantle." 
 
 "And hate," she retorted, "is most hideous 
 when his wolfish bristles are seen through 
 lamb-skin." 
 
 167 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 Perez laucflied. 
 
 o 
 
 " Call me wolf again," he said with a bow. 
 *' It is so sweet to hear thee. Thou hast 
 accustomed me of late to taunts and insults. 
 They do no harm, and I take them as pet 
 names." 
 
 "Then I'll call you simply Diego Perez," 
 she said, looking him steadily in the face. 
 *' It is the most ill-omened name I know 
 between the world's two poles." 
 
 A change came over his face. 
 
 *' I have already outstretched the usual 
 patience of a courtship," he said, " in wooing 
 you so long. Do not you stretch it further, 
 lest it should snap in two. I have your 
 father's promise. You are mine. To - day 
 I woo ; but to-morrow I shall order. Don't 
 fight too long with fate ; and, above all, 
 beware how you call the wolf too often by 
 his name. Or if you do, wait till you have 
 seen him rip." 
 
 " Ho, ho ! the fleece is off," laughed Rosita. 
 
 168 
 
The Wolf in the Fleece 
 
 /'And better so. It fitted you ill; and your 
 growl is sweeter than your bleat." 
 
 " What, did I growl ? " he said, tightening 
 his teeth suggestively. "And yet I am no 
 wolf. At most a lamb who, as it happens, 
 has fangs, and who, elsewhere in other woods 
 and other seasons, has occasionally eaten up 
 a woman on less provocation than you, young 
 lady, have given him to-day." 
 
 " I thank you for the warning," she answered, 
 "though in truth I did not need it. And now 
 be pleased to take some other path than mine 
 to reach the camp." 
 
 " I owe it to your father to see you safely 
 back." 
 
 " What ! do you force your company upon 
 me?'* she asked. "Answer plainly." 
 
 " Force is an ugly word," he said, " It is 
 my duty to see you through these brambles. 
 And, besides, I have a little tale that I would 
 like to bell you as we go along — a little tale 
 about a woman. The story is pathetic and 
 
 169 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 instructive, and may show you the latent 
 goodness of my heart. I wish to prove to 
 you how kind a soul I have." 
 
 *' I shall not listen," she rejoined, walking 
 on. 
 
 " Oh, you'll hear enough for my purpose," 
 he laughed, "whether you listen or not." 
 
 And he told her how once, in Spain, he had 
 
 taken a girl for a walk by the tall reeds at 
 
 sunset, a girl that had loved him just a little 
 
 too well, and was irksome. And how he had 
 
 suddenly told her to say any prayers she might 
 
 have to say, as she had but five minutes to 
 
 live. And how, with the great beads of 
 
 sweat on her forehead, she had besought him 
 
 not to send her unshriven to her Maker. . . . 
 
 And how, in the great gentleness of his heart, 
 
 he had actually shriven her himself as patiently 
 
 as a barefooted friar, listening to the tale of 
 
 her sins and her fibs, and her woeful love 
 
 for himself, and the meat she had eaten on 
 
 Fridays ; and how he had then sent her to 
 
 170 
 
The Wolf in the Fleece 
 
 Heaven with her soul as clean as the new- 
 starched frill she was wearing. 
 
 ^' The story is pathetic, is it not ? " he laughed. 
 
 '* I haven't been attending," she answered. 
 
 " Were it not better to make no more 
 resistance, and accept so tender-souled a 
 suitor ? " 
 
 "Never, never!" she cried. "Not till God's 
 
 lightning falls on your head. Oh, Omniscient 
 
 and Omnipotent God, give me strength to 
 
 fight out Thy battle with this man ! " 
 
 Perez looked at her, admiration for her 
 beauty struggling with his rage. 
 
 " You will think better of it at your leisure," 
 he muttered. 
 
 " If all your soldiers help to drag me to 
 the altar," she continued, " they shall not force 
 me to be your wife ; for I give you fair notice 
 that I shall stab you on the altar steps, and 
 be God's executioner. The day you have 
 recourse to force shall be your last, and mine." 
 
 "What! threats of dagger?" he laughed. 
 
 171 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 " I love to see a beauty in her fury, and 
 know how to value a woman's threat. Its 
 a pretty bubble." 
 
 Kosita stopped, and stood in front of him, 
 her face white and her teeth set. 
 
 *' Look at this," she said. 
 
 She took a small dagger from her bosom, 
 bared her left arm, and passed the weapon 
 slowly through it. 
 
 "Do you believe me now?" she asked. "It 
 is for you, not for me, to meditate at leisure, 
 and weigh the peril." 
 
 And, leaving him rooted to the spot with 
 surprise, she disappeared among the trees. 
 
 Perez looked after her long. 
 
 *' By all the fiends on the devil's stair," he 
 said to himself, as he walked slowly towards 
 the camp, " I didn't think her so strong ; and 
 I own that this once I have reckoned without 
 my host. Yes, she's right. It's for me to 
 ponder the items of my scheme at leisure. 
 She's dangerous ; and I must change my plan 
 
 172 
 
The Wolf in the Fleece 
 
 from top to bottom, and build up the edifice 
 of fortune on other ground. And better so, 
 perhaps. The wind has shifted since last I 
 looked at the compass ; and it brings me 
 whispers strangely tempting from the Indian 
 King. And now that I am free to listen to 
 his offer, and to found my altered schemes 
 on his help, I can deal after my own heart 
 with her father and herself" 
 
 173 
 
CHAPTER XIX 
 
 THE PORTENT 
 
 The demons painted on the walls of the great 
 rock-temple of Bimini had disappeared under 
 a tapestry of dewy blossoms, bright in its 
 transient patterns ; while the pillars of the 
 huge fane of Beauty and Destruction concealed 
 the scars of their immemorable age under a 
 garb of odoriferous palms, and seemed to be 
 holding each other like colossal captives with 
 the ephemeral chains of spring. On the 
 pavement the stains of human sacrifice were 
 hidden by a freshly-strewn litter of numberless 
 flowers. The troops of garland-girls who had 
 been wreathing the temple had finished their 
 task, and had at last taken their departure. 
 
 174 
 
The Portent 
 
 It was the Feast of Arrows. For seven days, 
 the countless warriors of the most warlike 
 nation of the Setting Sun were about to bring 
 their quivers in silent companies, to the 
 monotonous booming of the gong of gongs, 
 that every long copper-headed shaft might get 
 its baptism of poison. And never yet, since 
 those stupendous columns had first been carved 
 out of the living rock by long-dead generations, 
 innumerable centuries ago, had venom of such 
 potency been required to stem the rising tide 
 of invasion ; and never had the yearly Feast 
 of Arrows been celebrated with such solemnity 
 as on the present occasion, when the white 
 invaders, with the impious help of the 
 rebellious tribes, had reached the very gates 
 of the capital. 
 
 Two figures were moving in the shadow of 
 the great columns, both stricken in years — the 
 one a tall, white-haired man in white pontifical 
 robes ; the other a woman so wrinkled and 
 shrivelled that she might have been a mummy 
 
 175 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 divested of its swathings and re-animated, to 
 prowl for an hour amid the scenes of a life 
 extinct for ages. 
 
 *' Is all ready, Othoxa?" asked the tall 
 High Priest, approaching the shrivelled crone, 
 and tying up one of the garlands, which had 
 got unfastened. " Is all ready, where the 
 perilous fumes of thy cauldron steam ? " 
 
 ''Yes," answered the Sorceress; '*and woe 
 betide the white invaders ! They will not long 
 be white, if they give battle. For the slightest 
 scratch with any arrow or javelin of my 
 steeping will make their pale, bloodless bodies 
 turn black, and fit them for the burial-place 
 of dogs. Oh, trust my brew. Have I not 
 worked in poison till the very flies that sting 
 me drop dead on the floor ? The art which we 
 have developed since the remotest antiquity, 
 of feeding snakes on the juice of deadly 
 plants, and then inoculating with their venom, 
 increased in potency, the deadly plant itself, 
 and so augmenting in a ceaseless circle the 
 
 176 
 
The Portent 
 
 power of poison, has now reached to incredible 
 perfection. One black drop of our undiluted 
 and last-developed death -juice " 
 
 " I know," said the High Priest. " But tell 
 me, what demon shapes have risen up in thy 
 fumes ? " 
 
 " Three gods of terror," answered Othoxa, 
 " that were familiar to my visions, and one 
 new one. First of all Eyes-of-Madness, he of 
 the scarlet bat-wings. Then Ice-of-Fear, the 
 god with the lidless eye-balls ; and Wince-of- 
 Agony, the mighty tormentor. The unknown 
 spirit had the head of a tiger, with fair human 
 limbs, which he kept unceasingly eating — every 
 limb growing again while he ate the others. 
 It was a wonderful and terrific vision ; and 
 never, since the god of Silent Horror, years 
 ago, laid on my novice head his cold, restless 
 wreath of living vipers, which turned my 
 black hair white, have I beheld so dreadful a 
 j deity." 
 
 I " I know him well," said the white-robed 
 
 II 177 M 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 pontiff. " He is the great and all-pervading 
 god of Cosmic Cruelty. His name is Ataflis ; 
 and it is owing to his unlimited power that 
 Nature preys for ever on her own self — that 
 the earth and the air and the sea are filled 
 with millions of creatures who feed on others, 
 and themselves are eaten. Is that the singing 
 of thy poison-girls ? " 
 
 A weird sound rose and echoed through the 
 heavy vaults of the temple. The song was 
 of the beauty and cruelty of Nature. How, 
 when things were first made, the vapours of 
 Hell had crept up to the surface of the world ; 
 how they had fattened the roots of the plants 
 that kill, and how the sap of destruction had 
 filled fruit and berry, while live trickles of 
 horror had run through the grasses in the 
 shape of innumerable snakes. How tetanus 
 had followed the rattlesnake's bite, and palsy 
 that of the cobra and the asp. Venom and 
 blood were the juice of creation, and torture 
 lorded it over earth and ocean. All Nature 
 
 178 
 
The Portent 
 
 teemed with claw and fang ; above was 
 beauty, beneath was pain. The leopardess 
 lay in shadow and flowers, two live green 
 embers glowing in her eyes. The sea was 
 all sunshine, but the shark was beneath it; 
 the wave of red water bubbled up from his 
 triple row of teeth. But man was the 
 monarch of torture ; murder the breath of 
 his nostrils. And the arrows they were 
 dipping in the juices of night were winged 
 with madness, with horror, with unthinkable 
 pain. 
 
 "Thy maids sing well," said the High 
 Priest, as the words died down. ''The arrow- 
 song is worthy of the temple of that gigantic 
 man - devouring flower, goddess at once of 
 Murder and of Beauty, whose ever-hungry 
 tentacles grasp living human limbs ; whose 
 awful bosom is as ready to engulf a slave 
 as the small sundew to engulf an insect. 
 The Flower of Cruelty, the lonely Empress 
 
 of the virgin forests, whom our fathers 
 
 17a 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 enshrined in this rock -temple, and who has 
 there grown in beauty and in appetite, is 
 the symbol of what pervades the universe. 
 The two great ruling powers of Nature are 
 Cruelty and Beauty, Pain and Sunshine. 
 And even as her enormous tendrils grasp 
 the wretch whom each day we give her to 
 devour, so Nature in her placid loveliness 
 murders, through sea, earth, and air. The 
 world is like the walls in which we are 
 standing: : there are thousands of flowers 
 above, and catacombs of dungeons below. 
 But I hear a sound of steps. Doubtless they 
 are coming to tell me that the monarch is 
 in sight. Atalpa comes to see how we have 
 wreathed our walls and columns. Get thee 
 gone, Othoxa." 
 
 A moment later, Atalpa the Ever- Young, 
 accompanied by two tame pumas, and followed 
 by an escort of dusky warriors, entered the 
 great carved caves. He was strikingly hand- 
 some, at least so far as was compatible with 
 
 180 
 
The Portent 
 
 the Indian type of features ; the admirable 
 semi-nude limbs expressing the perfection of 
 every physical quality that one man can 
 envy in another — youth, strength, agility, 
 endurance — and his face a sombre power. 
 He towered in height above the rest, from 
 whom he was distinguished in dress only by 
 the single dazzling gem which he wore on 
 his brow. 
 
 " Lord of the Pumas, ever beautiful and 
 ever young Atalpa," said the High Priest, 
 bowing almost to the ground, " I bid thee 
 welcome to these sacred and eternal caves, 
 to-day as ever." 
 
 " For a thousand years," answered the 
 monarch, " have these old columns, on the 
 yearly Feast of Arrows, put on their garb 
 of green, bursting as regularly into leaf as 
 if they teemed with sap, and never yet has 
 the King failed to come and praise the 
 flowers. But for once I have neither eyes 
 nor nostrils for garlands however s vveet ; and 
 
 181 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 I am come with a care-laden brow to consult 
 upon the means which our religion offers, 
 to stem the white invasion." 
 
 ^*My own thoughts have not been idle 
 since the news grew darker," answered the 
 High Priest. " I have gone over in my mind 
 all the great invasions which we have baffled 
 in the course of ages, and in each case I find 
 that we have owed eventual triumph to one 
 single cause — our policy of friendship with 
 the gods. The gods, we must never forget 
 it, are destructive forces ; they act from 
 appetite, not from justice. If they were just, 
 there would be no need of prayer. Nothing 
 is so mercenary as a god in man's necessity." 
 
 " The whites are few," said Atalpa, " com- 
 pared with our legions ; but they carry the 
 thunderbolt with them, and the sound of it 
 shakes the great forest : every echoing peal 
 means scores of dead. Their heads are capped 
 with metal, their breasts with plates that no 
 shafts can transfix ; their very fingers are 
 
 182 
 
The Portent 
 
 cased in a sort of white copper. If I had 
 not seen with my own eyes the corpses of 
 their dead, I should still think them gods. 
 Besides, they have got the tribes as their 
 allies." 
 
 *'Now let me know," said the High Priest, 
 "what presents thou bringest to the temple. 
 Much will depend on that." 
 
 " I bring eleven shields of beaten gold, 
 wrought round with figures that show the 
 war between the gods and the pumas. Then 
 I bring thee, in a precious casket, the great 
 ruby known as the Eye of Wrath, and twelve 
 barrels of minted gold." 
 
 "I think the Goddess will be willing to 
 accept the gift," replied the High Priest. 
 
 "In presence of the peril which grows 
 hour by hour," went on Atalpa, "there is 
 a thought which haunts me by day and 
 night. Dost thou remember the prophecy, 
 ages old, which says: 'The day will come 
 when this prosperous and victorious state will 
 
 183 
 
The Komance of the Fountain 
 
 wholly perish, if a white-skinned virgin be 
 not offered up in sacrifice to the great 
 Goddess ' ? " 
 
 ** Yes," answered the other, " I recollect it. 
 But it has always been interpreted to mean 
 that a virgin would be miraculously born 
 with a white skin among us." 
 
 ''Ay, and rightly," said Atalpa, ''so long 
 as we didn't know that a white-skinned race 
 existed in the world. But now we know it ; 
 and does it not seem as if the day were 
 come for the fulfilment of the prophecy, now 
 that the strangers have raised the tribes 
 against us, and are marching on the capital ? " 
 
 " Have the white invaders their women with 
 them ? " asked the High Priest. 
 
 " That I cannot tell," answered the Ever- 
 Young. " But I mean to send an embassy and 
 ask them for a truce, and so gain time, to get 
 to know them better. — But who comes here ? " 
 
 It was the Master of the Sacrifices. 
 Consternation was written on his face. 
 
 184 
 
The Portent 
 
 ** I come with staggering feet," lie said, 
 panting, and wiping the sweat from his fore- 
 head, " to bring the most monstrous news." 
 
 *' Quick, quick ! speak ! " commanded Atalpa 
 and the High Priest in one breath. " What is 
 it ? Don't keep us in suspense." 
 
 "A fearful portent," answered the newcomer; 
 ** a portent big with calamity to King and people. 
 The ever-devouring Goddess of this temple, for 
 the first time in history, has spurned her daily 
 victim." ' 
 
 " Spurned her daily victim ? " cried the High 
 Priest. " Impossible ! The omen would be too 
 monstrous." 
 
 '' I have just seen it — seen it with these very 
 eyes," the Master of the Sacrifices went on. 
 *' Scarcely had we placed the gagged and writh- 
 ing slave — a virgin of the black race of Xu — 
 in the great Flower's lap, when a convulsion 
 shook her immense petals. She relaxed the 
 feelers which had grasped the body of the 
 victim, and cast it out alive. We tried again 
 
 185 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 a second time ; and again she cast it out, alive 
 just as before. And when we made a third 
 attempt, the miracle took place even once more ; 
 except that the slave was then cast out dead." 
 
 The High Priest raised his hands in a gesture 
 of appalled despair. 
 
 *'No such tremendous portent has ever 
 prepared men's minds for disaster," he said in 
 a low, shaking voice, " since the great star 
 which trailed behind it a fan of fire depopulated 
 heaven, and since the earthquake which shook 
 the images of the gods to pieces, gave warning 
 of the most fatal battle that our history 
 records." 
 
 "Thou sayest well. Priest of the Scented 
 Murderess," said Atalpa. *'No such omen has 
 prepared the minds of men for disaster for 
 three centuries. But I see in this thing not 
 only a presage of evil, but something more 
 distinct. When I consider the peril that 
 surrounds us, and when I remember the 
 prophecy of old, the thing assumes another 
 
 186 
 
The Portent 
 
 aspect. I see a thought, a meaning, a purpose, 
 a command. The tongueless Goddess, in thus 
 spurning the victim we offer, means that she 
 wants another — something new for her terrific 
 maw ; and I can read her wish as clearly as if 
 she had spoken in words. She wants white 
 flesh ; and if we don't give it her, the pillars 
 of this state will stagger and split, and with 
 a crash that will outpeal the thunder with 
 which the white men's engines shake the air — 
 the edifice of ages will bury us in its fall." 
 
 And with a sign to his escort, he led the 
 way out of the temple. 
 
 187 
 
CHAPTER XX 
 
 IN THE SPANISH CAMP 
 
 There was drinking and singing and casting 
 of dice among the tents of the Spanish camp. 
 " Pass me the flagon, man," cried one of 
 the soldiers. " Till we dip our pewter in the 
 Fount of Youth, this old Canary is as sparkling 
 as any. 
 
 *' ' There's youth in each bubble 
 That rises and winks ; 
 No cares of age trouble 
 The soldier that drinks. 
 
 ** ' The sunshine is in it 
 
 That ripened the grape ; 
 So seize on the minute : 
 The cannon-mouths gape.' " 
 188 
 
In the Spanish Camp 
 
 Another caught up the song : 
 
 " ' There's youth in the tankard, 
 There's youth in the can ; 
 The vine was uncankered 
 That round the eaves ran ; 
 
 " ' And Age is a dragon 
 The soldier can kill, 
 If only the flagon 
 Has wine in it still.' " 
 
 "Ay, faith, there's youth in this, and we had 
 better enjoy it while we have it. Our little 
 store of bottled sunshine will have trickled 
 dry many a day and year before we reach the 
 Fountain." 
 
 *' That it will," answered the first; ''and 
 every drop of cellared wine in Christendom as 
 well. The magic water seems to be ebbing 
 further and further from our eyes as every 
 day goes by." 
 
 '' And yet," put in a little black Biscayan 
 who was sitting on a barrel, " they say the 
 Commander thinks success quite certain, now 
 
 189 
 
The Romance of the Fountaiii 
 
 that the Indian King has sent the envoys. 
 This morning they were walking through the 
 camp with their great golden armlets." 
 
 *'Yes, I saw them," replied the soldier who 
 had taken up the drinking song. " And they 
 are all old men, which of itself is sufficient 
 proof against the Fount of Youth. For, if the 
 Indians knew where it lies, would they send 
 us white-haired ambassadors ? " 
 
 "Ay, so I thought this very morning, as I 
 saw them pass," said a Catalonian ; " but Pedro 
 says it's because their King keeps the magic 
 water to himself, and takes good care not to 
 let his subjects taste it, that he alone may be 
 always young and strong." 
 
 " But some say that if he's got no wrinkles, 
 it's because he's never twice the same," said 
 another Biscayan. 
 
 ''How, never twice the same ? " 
 
 " I mean that he's elected for only a few 
 years among the very strongest of their young 
 warriors, and then yields his place to one as 
 
 190 
 
In the Spanish Camp 
 
 young. That's why he's never old, and youth 
 is always on the throne. And if there's any 
 truth in what they say, Atalpa is a title and 
 not a name. And their young King, instead 
 of having reigned six hundred years, hasn't 
 reigned six hundred days." 
 
 "If that's so, the sooner we give up this 
 wild-goose chase, the better for us all," said 
 an Andalusian pikeman. " For my part, I'm 
 getting to have less faith every day in this 
 strange water." 
 
 ''And yet," said a bullet-headed Castilian 
 who was stringing a cross-bow, '' I don't see 
 why an old man shouldn't be struck young 
 by a draught from the Fountain, if a man 
 still young can be struck suddenly white." 
 
 " Struck white ? " 
 
 '' Yes, like Don Pedro de Vega." 
 
 "Who was Ae?" 
 
 " Why, he was a man to whom the impossible 
 happened ; and that always turns your hair 
 white. If you've never heard the story I'll 
 
 191 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 tell it you," went on the crossbowman. "He 
 was an officer of the King's guard at Toledo, 
 and he feared neither man nor devil, neither 
 Heaven nor Hell. So all the women of Toledo 
 were in love with him. 
 
 "Late one night he was returning through 
 some deserted streets when he perceived a 
 woman leaning on a balcony in the moonlight. 
 He stopped short, for he saw at once that she 
 was marvellously handsome. 
 
 " ' It's a fine night, Don Pedro,' said she. 
 
 *' ' Oh, you know me ? ' he answered. 
 
 " ' Who doesn't know Don Pedro de yeo:a in 
 Toledo — and in Hell ? ' she laughed. 
 
 " ' And which of the two is this ? ' 
 
 " ' Perhaps both.' 
 
 '* So they talked on for a while ; and presently 
 
 she let down a silk ladder, and up he climbed, 
 
 and found himself in a beautiful room full of 
 
 light and mirrors and pictures, with gilded 
 
 mouldings and rare paintings on the ceiling, 
 
 and exquisite furniture. Then she led him 
 
 192 
 
In the Spanish Camp 
 
 into an inner room, where a small table was 
 spread for two, with supper in splendid silver 
 plate, and rich wines in glittering cut glass, 
 just as if she had been expecting him. So, 
 taking off his long straight sword, he placed 
 it upright in the corner, and sat down to 
 supper. 
 
 " She was quite the most beautiful woman he 
 had ever seen in his life ; and he remained 
 with her till the white light of dawn crept 
 in through the shutters. He had to be on 
 duty at the palace early that morning ; so he 
 tore himself away from her at last; and 
 promising to return soon, he left the house 
 through the front door and hurried off. On 
 his way he met one of his brother officers 
 who was also bound for the palace, and as 
 they went along told him of his adventure. 
 
 " 'Why, Where's your sword?' says the other 
 suddenly. 
 
 " Don Pedro clapped his hand to his hip ; it 
 was not there. He had forgotten it in the 
 
 193 N 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 house he had just left. So there was nothing 
 for it but to return on his steps ; and bidding 
 his friend make an excuse for his being late 
 at the palace, he hurried back. 
 
 "He found the street and the house, and 
 called gently under the window. But there 
 was no answer : the house was as silent as 
 death. 
 
 " Presently a milkman came along. 
 
 " * You waste your breath,' said he ; ' that's 
 an empty house.' 
 
 " Don Pedro muttered a curse of impatience, 
 and the other passed on. 
 
 " Then he tried throwing pebbles up at the 
 window, but still in vain. 
 
 "A baker's boy passed. 
 
 "'That's an empty house,' he said, 'empty 
 for years.' And he, too, passed on. 
 
 " Then Don Pedro, stepping back into the 
 middle of the road, examined the house. It 
 was now broad daylight. There could be no 
 doubt : it was the one where he had passed 
 
 194 
 
In the Spanish Camp 
 
 the night. It was unlike all the others in the 
 street, and had a very peculiar escutcheon cut 
 in stone over the door. He had been struck 
 by it overnight in the light of the moon. 
 
 " Suddenly his eye was caught by three little 
 leaden seals on the lock. They were such as 
 are put by the authorities on a house that is 
 locked up by legal process. 
 
 "By this time a little crowd had begun to 
 form round him, all of whom insisted that the 
 house had been empty and locked up since any 
 of them could remember. 
 
 " ' Bring me a ladder,' he cried. And shaking 
 his fist at the house, he swore by God's thumbs 
 he would see the riddle out. 
 
 " A ladder was brought and placed against the 
 balcony. He climbed up and shook the shutter 
 of the window through which he had entered 
 some hours before. It was so rotten from 
 neglect that it gave way at once. Before him 
 was a room entirely empty of furniture, but full 
 of dust and cobwebs. His feet left their print 
 
 196 
 
The Komance of the Fountain 
 
 on the fine white dust as clearly as if it had 
 been fine snow. He recognised the room 
 unmistakably. He recognised the paintings 
 on the ceiling, but faded and discoloured ; the 
 mouldings of faded gold. There was no possi- 
 bility of doubt : it was the identical room. 
 And yet how could it be ? 
 
 *' He pushed his way through the old stale 
 cobwebs into the inner room — the one where 
 he had supped. It was as empty and dusty 
 as the other ; and there also he recognised 
 the discoloured paintings on the ceiling, 
 and every empty ornament of faint and faded 
 gold. 
 
 " But, of course, it could not be, since all had 
 been light and colour and fulness and splendour ! 
 and all here was emptiness and cobwebs and 
 dust. 
 
 " He was about to turn and leave the room, 
 when his heart suddenly stopped. There, in 
 the empty corner, overspun with dusty cobwebs, 
 stood his sword." 
 
 196 
 
In the Spanish Camp 
 
 The Castilian ceased. 
 
 ** And so his hair turned white ? " asked one 
 of the soldiers. 
 
 "Yes," said the Castilian, "from that hour. 
 It always does when a man finds himself face 
 to face with the impossible." 
 
 " I don't say no," said the Catalonian who 
 had spoken before. " But a man can be struck 
 suddenly old by many other things besides that. 
 Doctor Faustus, for instance ; he was struck 
 back into old age by losing his ring." 
 
 "How that?" they asked. 
 
 " His youth depended on a magic ring that 
 the Devil had given him. One night, when 
 he was living at Venice with a famous wanton 
 called Lucretia, she removed it from his finger 
 while he lay asleep." 
 
 "Well?" 
 
 "He was lying in all his youth and beauty 
 while she crouched over him, watching what 
 would happen ; trying to see beneath the 
 surface of his life, like one who searches deep 
 
 197 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 waters for a corpse that can be caught only in 
 glimpses. Well, as soon as the ring was off 
 his finger, a change came over him. His face 
 collapsed. A thousand wrinkles spread their 
 network over it, and his hair whitened like 
 whitening ashes as she watched him shrivel 
 away. He had passed in two minutes from 
 thirty to ninety." 
 
 "Well," said the Castilian, "it only proves 
 that a man can pass suddenly from youth to 
 age. And, as I said before, if a man can be 
 struck white in a moment, why shouldn't a 
 draught from the Fountain be able to strike 
 a man young ? " 
 
 " I don't know as to that," said the 
 Andalusian, "but what I know is that I am 
 getting to disbelieve more and more in the 
 water." 
 
 " If only we were laying our hands on gold 
 and jewels," said one of the Biscay ans, " it 
 wouldn't matter so much. But to have all 
 these dangers and fatigues thousands of miles 
 
 198 
 
In the Spanish Camp 
 
 from home, and get after all neither gold 
 nor youth " 
 
 *' That's exactly what I say," said the 
 Andalusian. "Why, if the Fount of Youth 
 exists, would not that God-curst and never- 
 dying Hebrew, who trudges for ever round 
 and round the world, over the graves of those 
 whose ancestors he knew, have found it out 
 by now ? His curse compels his lonely dusty 
 feet to measure and re-measure every inch of 
 hill and plain, of city and desert ; and if the 
 Fount of Youth were to be found, he would 
 have drunk the draught." 
 
 " Perhaps he has," said the Castilian. 
 
 "No, he is as old as ever," said the other. 
 " On the day before we sailed from Spain, 
 while I was thinking of the Fount of Youth 
 and all our hopes, I met him in the street as 
 the twilight fell." 
 
 A murmur of mingled curiosity and in- 
 credulity greeted his words, and the soldiers 
 drew closer round the speaker. 
 
 199 
 
The Romance of the Foimtain 
 
 " What was he like ? Tell us what he 
 was like." 
 
 "His great white beard," said the Andalusian, 
 " more than a yard in length, waved behind 
 him in the wind. In his hand he held a tall 
 spiked staff, on which the fifteen records of 
 his centuries were notched. His Syrian sandals, 
 bound on with dusty thongs, were made of 
 thickest hide of crocodile, to stand the wear 
 and tear of his eternal trudging. His wrinkled 
 gourd, the minister of his eternal thirst, only 
 less wrinkled than his face, swung from his 
 girdle, that was made of one great snake-skin, 
 with its tail in its mouth, the symbol of his 
 life. I barred his way. Like a sleeper 
 suddenly awakened, he started and stared, 
 and a flame shot out of his sunken sockets. 
 *Why dost thou stop me. Ephemeral?' he 
 asked. ' Walk to thy grave, and let me go 
 my way, to make for the earth another belt 
 of steps.' ' Tarry,' I answered, ' only to tell 
 me this : Hast thou never lighted, in thy 
 
 200 
 
In the Spanish Camp 
 
 endless journey, on the thing they call the 
 Fount of Youth ? ' He paused for a moment, 
 while a frown of pain convulsed his forehead. 
 * The Fount of Youth ? ' he said, like one 
 slowly muttering in a dream. ' It bubbles up 
 between Death's feet, in every land, in every 
 plain and every city ; and what have Death 
 and I in common ? ' And he passed on, and 
 disappeared in the twilight." 
 
 The soldiers shook their heads, and looked 
 at one another. 
 
 " Strange, very strange," said a Gallician 
 bowman. " There's still a little wine at the 
 bottom of the flagon. Pass it round. Can 
 any of you tell me : is it true that since 
 Thursday the Commander's daughter wears her 
 arm in a sling ? " 
 
 "Ay, it's as true as gospel," answered the 
 
 Castilian who had spoken before. "At first 
 
 they said she'd had a fall ; but now they say 
 
 one of her Indian women sprang at her with 
 
 a knife. They're as lithe as panthers, and 
 
 201 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 as savage. They say she's pardoned her and 
 hushed it up." 
 
 *' Well, anyhow, she's hurt," said his mate. 
 " And here's to her good health. She's been 
 the soldiers friend all through. Dost thou 
 remember how she took up our cause against 
 Morasquez when he tried to cheat us of the 
 salt, and how she saved Pedrillo from the 
 lashes when all was ready ? " 
 
 " And he's grateful," said the Castilian. 
 " He'd give his life to save her little finger. 
 Yes, let's drink her health with what's left 
 in the flagon. Here's to her quick recovery ! 
 And now let's finish the chorus : 
 
 " ' There's youth in the barrel, 
 There's youth iu the keg ; 
 So thump, as you carol, 
 Your dry wooden leg ; 
 
 " ' And think, as you tipple 
 At eighty and more, 
 That so the old cripple 
 Has youth as before 
 
 202 
 
 > >» 
 
CHAPTER XXI 
 
 SILENT PERIL 
 
 As the days passed by, Don Luis sank deeper 
 and deeper into his Chief Lieutenant's power, 
 and writhed in soul ever more helplessly. He 
 felt his will weakening in the man's brutal 
 grasp, and temporised and compromised and 
 played a double game from morning to night. 
 He daily took more and more to the son of 
 his old hereditary foe, and daily felt less and 
 less able to give him his daughter, as his 
 heart bade him do. 
 
 '^Wait,'^ he said to him, "wait. All wiU 
 come right in the end. But not yet, not yet. 
 Wait till the expedition is over. All will 
 then be different. First we must have the 
 consent of your father Alvareda ; and that 
 
 203 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 can be obtained only when we return to 
 Europe glorious and triumphant. Then he 
 will be more eager for this marriage than even 
 my own self. The honour of an alliance with 
 the Conqueror of Youth will outweigh all 
 the centuries of hatred that have divided our 
 ancestors, and will blot out the injuries that 
 have hardened our hearts. Wait and be 
 patient." 
 
 So he had imposed on them both the strictest 
 command to keep their relations from the 
 knowledge of the Chief Captain, whom he 
 continued to treat openly as his daughter's 
 future husband. Indeed, in his miserable 
 subjection, he made this secrecy towards Perez 
 the absolute condition of his favour and of 
 his acquiescence in their loves. 
 
 Nothing led them to believe that Perez 
 suspected. The Chief Captain had offered no 
 opposition when Don Luis had expressed his 
 intention of raising Juan from the ranks, and 
 he treated him with sufficient civility in public 
 
 204 
 
SUent Peril 
 
 when lie took his place among the officers, 
 with whom he was already a favourite. It 
 was true that when Juan had occasion to 
 meet Perez alone, he would see the latter's 
 brow darken unmistakably, and more than 
 once he had seen him fasten a long and evil 
 look upon him when he thought himself 
 un watched. But after the struggle they had 
 had together on the ship before reaching 
 Bimini — a struggle in which Juan had had 
 the upper hand — it would have been strange 
 had it been otherwise. On the surface the 
 affair seemed to be forgotten ; and though 
 fully alive to the Chief Captain's treachery 
 and vindictiveness, Juan felt but little fear, 
 till a circumstance occurred which pointed to 
 more hidden peril and to a more implacable 
 hatred. 
 
 One evening he was sitting in the corner of 
 his tent occupied in mending his clothes, 
 which had much need of repair. The light 
 was fading so fast that he was about to lay 
 
 205 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 aside his work, when suddenly the canvas was 
 noiselessly lifted and a dark face peered into 
 the tent. The light being less within than 
 without, the stranger did not see Juan, whose 
 eyes, accustomed to the half light, were 
 following all his movements ; while Juan on 
 his side recognised in him an Indian whom 
 he knew to be one of the personal attendants 
 of Diego Perez, and devoted to his service. 
 After having assured himself, as he thought, 
 that the tent was empty, the Indian crept in 
 stealthily, and drawing out a small bottle- 
 shaped gourd, bent over Juan's empty bed 
 and threw back the blanket. Then he shook 
 the gourd up and down over it in various 
 directions, as if he were sprinkling the bed 
 with some liquid. Nothing, however, seemed 
 to issue from the opening, till suddenly some- 
 thing shot out of it — something small and 
 black and wriggling, at sight of which the 
 young Spaniard felt an icy thrill run through 
 him. But in another instant he had leapt up, 
 
 206 
 
Silent Peril 
 
 and in a single bound had sprung on the 
 half-naked Indian, and, grasping him irresis- 
 tibly by the neck and shoulders, had forced 
 him, face downwards, on the bed and on what 
 he had put into it. There he held him down, 
 writhing and helpless, till his limbs, after a 
 few dreadful convulsions that grew weaker 
 and weaker, ceased to struggle, and became 
 rigid in the death that he had intended for 
 another. Then Juan lifted the man's body 
 off the snake that lay crushed underneath it, 
 and cast both of them out of the tent into 
 the night. 
 
 From that moment Juan felt that his life 
 was in peril from something that was far 
 more difficult to deal with, and that required 
 far more vigilant watching, than the open 
 hatred of his enemy. But he mentioned the 
 incident to no one, not even to Rosita. She 
 could not have helped or protected him, and 
 she had terrors enough of her own to rob her 
 of sleep and peaceful dreams. 
 
 207 
 
CHAPTEE XXII 
 
 THE AMBASSADORS 
 
 Two Indian envoys, waiting in Diego Perez's 
 tent with the answer to certain proposals that 
 he had made to their ever-young King, were 
 conversing in a low tone. They had with 
 them another Indian to act as interpreter. 
 He had once got lost in the great forests, 
 and had strayed into a small Spanish settle- 
 ment in Yucatan, where he had acquired some 
 knowledge of the language, and had somehow i 
 eventually made his way back to Bimini. 
 Satisfaction gleamed in the envoys' eyes, for 
 the spirits who shaped the destinies of their 
 state seemed to have given it their support. 
 
 208 
 
The Ambassadors 
 
 The treaty seemed in a fair way to completion, 
 and all was going well. 
 
 " Success is certain," whispered the Chief 
 Ambassador ; " and Heaven itself is giving us 
 omens of its favour. Late last night, as I 
 was fathoming the sky for a sign among the 
 million stars, an unknown constellation, in the 
 shape of a great puma, twinkled into sight, 
 with head erect and victorious." 
 
 " Strange," said the other ; " this morning 
 I, too, beheld the puma made of cloud. It 
 lasted but a minute." 
 
 " That matters little, if but the emblem of 
 our people showed itself," answered the Chief 
 Envoy. " We have made a great and cunning 
 treaty. It gives us the white virgin on whom 
 the saving of our state depends. And the 
 same clause which gives her to our great 
 Goddess, secures what we would have the 
 Goddess grant — the departure of the invaders." 
 
 " Hast thou seen her ? " asked his companion. 
 
 " The mind of man could conceive no whiter 
 
 209 o 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 victim," answered the Chief. " White as the 
 white invaders are, she seems to belong to 
 some yet whiter race. Her pearly skin seems 
 not to be of human texture, but of the same 
 white material which forms the water-lily's 
 petals, or the disc of the thin moon at day- 
 break, when it floats most wafery in the sky. 
 As I saw her among her handmaids of our own 
 swarthy race, she seemed to be some pearl- 
 faced spirit." 
 
 " All is strange and unlike reality among 
 these white-faced warriors," the Second Envoy 
 rejoined. " Hast thou examined their lightning- 
 spitting weapons ? Would'st thou care to handle 
 them ? " 
 
 " Not I. As soon take up the thunderbolt 
 itself when it lies folded in the arrow-house of 
 Heaven. But hush ! here comes the Spaniard." 
 
 "Well," said Perez through the interpreter, 
 after a few words of perfunctory compliment 
 and salutation, " have you received your King's 
 answer ? Does he agree ? " 
 
 210 
 
The Ambassadors 
 
 " His messenger has returned, and lie agrees," 
 answered the Chief Ambassador through the 
 same channeL "And in token of his satis- 
 faction, Atalpa sends thee five of his largest 
 rubies." 
 
 The Chief Captain took the stones with a 
 hand whose greedy haste he restrained by an 
 efi'ort, and held them to the light. They 
 were of enormous size. 
 
 '' Let me see them," he said. '' They seem 
 good stones, though I have seen larger. I 
 have a taste for such, and thank him. And 
 now let us recapitulate the terms of this 
 secret pact. First, I engage to hand over to 
 you the daughter of our Chief." 
 
 " She must be given up to us in public by 
 her father," said the Envoy. " Our creed 
 exacts it ; else she would have no value for 
 our Goddess." 
 
 " You need have no fear," answered Perez. 
 " She shall be given up freely and openly. 
 The glittering bait with which I mean to lead 
 
 211 
 
The Eomance of the Foimtam 
 
 him into the trap is bright enough for that. 
 If you will promise to lay the stipulated 
 ambush by the brink of some solitary forest 
 pool, which I will tell him is the Fountain of 
 Youth, I undertake to make him, as its price, 
 give her up in presence of his soldiers, and 
 bind myself to send him thither to his death." 
 
 " We have a dozen magic springs," said the 
 second of the Envoys ; " but none that makes 
 men young." 
 
 "Oh, any pool will do," the Chief Captain 
 replied with a laugh, "provided you kill him 
 by its brink." 
 
 "The ambush shall be laid," said the Chief 
 
 Envoy. 
 
 "Then, once he is killed," Perez resumed, 
 "and once I am in possession of supreme 
 command, I undertake to draw away our 
 forces from this land, on payment of three 
 hundred bags of gold of the stipulated weight." 
 
 "All this Atalpa understands and has sworn 
 to," answered the Indian. 
 
 212 
 
The Ambassadors 
 
 " Then there remains nothing further to 
 settle," said Perez, " save the details of hour 
 and place, which we can do to-night. By- 
 then I shall have worked on my Commander's 
 mind. So for the while farewell." 
 
 And he dismissed his visitors, and remained 
 pacing up and down the tent. His scheme 
 was prospering. Everything was marching 
 for the best. " But, wondrous and ever- 
 young Atalpa," he mused, " thou art young 
 and innocent indeed. I am an honest pirate, 
 and shall keep our stipulations to the letter; 
 and in return for thy three hundred bags of 
 gold, if all goes well, I shall relieve thee of 
 the white invaders' presence. But have I 
 pledged myself never to return ? The land 
 that has given me these rubies is not one to 
 be left for long, and thou shalt see me again 
 on thy shores. And now, to manage that yet 
 greater fool who day by day counts his 
 wrinkles in the mirror." 
 
 He had not long to wait. The curtain of 
 
 213 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 the tent was raised, and Don Luis appeared in 
 the entrance — the same vague and wistful face 
 as ever, but with an eager light of expectation 
 in the pale grey eyes. 
 
 " I saw the Envoys leave the tent," he said. 
 " How go the negotiations ? " 
 
 " Did I not tell you that you would not 
 repent having left them wholly in my hands ? " 
 answered Perez. " Prepare your soul for 
 mighty news." 
 
 " Quick ! Tell it me at once," the other cried, 
 seizing him by the arm. 
 
 " Prepare your soul for what your thoughts 
 have played with for many a year," Perez 
 repeated. 
 
 Don Luis stamped his foot with a childish 
 impatience. 
 
 " Don't keep me dangling on the tenter- 
 hooks of thy vague phrases," he chafed. " Out 
 with it. Tell me what it is. Are we any 
 nearer to the Fount of Youth ? Answer ; 
 quick, quick ! " 
 
 214 
 
The Ambassadors 
 
 *' The Fount of Youth is yours." And Perez, 
 folding his arms, watched the effect of his 
 words on the weak, eager face. 
 
 " God ! this is too sudden," the Dreamer 
 murmured, pressing his hand to his side, as if 
 to control some acute and dire pain. '' Do 
 not kill me with joy, but give me strength to 
 bear it. . . ." 
 
 The Chief Captain waited till the other 
 resumed his composure. 
 
 "The Indian King," he said, as the Youth- 
 Seeker signed to him to proceed, " consents to 
 let you reach the Fountain with a small escort, 
 provided you will bind yourself, by all you 
 hold most holy in our religion, to leave the 
 land with all your forces the moment you 
 have tasted the magic water." 
 
 "My soul is drunk and dazzled," said Don 
 Luis. "There's too much light for thought 
 round about it. Give me time to grasp thy 
 words. My ideas press on each other's heels 
 like a mob, and hustle me along as I reel from 
 
 215 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 the awful blow of joy. I pray thee, leave me 
 for a little. I would fain be alone for a few 
 minutes, until my staggered soul can keep its 
 footing." 
 
 Perez left the tent, after fastening a long and 
 curious look — was it contempt or triumph ? — 
 on his Chief. Don Luis threw himself on a 
 couch, and grasped his aching forehead in his 
 hands. 
 
 But was it of any use to try and think ? 
 
 He had the Fount of Youth ! He had the 
 Fount of Youth ! That was the only thought 
 that he was able to shape. And was it a real 
 thought ? It seemed more like a feeling, a sort 
 of terrible brightness within him. He had the 
 Fount of Youth ! He had the Fount of Youth ! 
 His hand was on the end and object of his 
 life. 
 
 That ever-rosy God, that ever-smooth-browed 
 Spirit, that swift wearer of the sandals of the 
 Dawn, had he at last overtaken him ? Was he 
 at last his ? Oh, how long he had pursued him 
 
 216 
 
The Ambassadors 
 
 day and night on the silent river of the Tears ; 
 for ever seeming to clutch the dazzling shade, 
 while Time's remorseless current but increased 
 the space between them. . . . And now, at 
 last, at last, as if by a sudden bound, he held 
 him in his grasp ! 
 
 He drew a little mirror from his doublet, and 
 looked at himself in it. 
 
 Look at these wrinkles, look at that long 
 line down his cheek, and at that deep starry 
 crowsfoot under the eye, at those deep furrows 
 on his forehead. . . . Oh, how he laughed at 
 all those wrinkles now ! The rosy finger-tip 
 of ever-glorious Youth would wipe them out 
 on the morrow. And those flakes of snow on 
 his head and on his beard, the morrow's sun 
 would melt them for ever. To-day his brow 
 was still the shrivelled parchment on which 
 the Cares had written their lamentable story ; 
 to-morrow it would be the virgin tablet where 
 Love would write in kisses. The prize was 
 won. He had the Fount of Youth ! The goal 
 
 217 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 was reached. Dream was dream no longer. 
 Now the rosy spirits that did the errands of 
 the smooth-browed God might come and hover 
 round him, as they had hovered round old 
 iEson, when Medea's art had called them from 
 the mansions of the Sunrise to make him young 
 once more, to let him drain Youth's cup beauti- 
 ful and god-like. . . . 
 
 iEson ? Oh, he would lift the golden beaker 
 as ^son never did ! He would lift it higher 
 than he himself ever had on the wildest day of 
 adolescence in the expansion of natural youth ! 
 He would plant his foot upon Death's neck, 
 crowned with acanthus and roses ! He would 
 defy earth's care, earth's woe ; and, like a god, 
 panting with life, he would drink to the rising 
 sun ! 
 
 A voice startled him in the midst of his 
 triumphant imagining. 
 
 " There is one article in the treaty," said 
 Perez, whom he had not heard re-enter the 
 tent, " which I had perhaps better tell you 
 
 218 
 
The Ambassadors 
 
 of now. As you must pass, in order to reach 
 the Fount of Youth, by many of his shrines 
 and temples, the Indian King insists on a 
 hostage, whom he will keep as long as you 
 are there, that no offence should be offered 
 to his gods." 
 
 " What hostage has he fixed on ? " asked 
 the Commander in a voice that betokened no 
 interest. 
 
 "Your daughter," answered the Chief Cap- 
 tain. 
 
 " My daughter ? Never, never ! He must 
 take some one else. It's preposterous." 
 
 "He will take no one else." 
 
 " What ! " cried Don Luis, " place my 
 daughter in his hands, entrust her beauty to 
 his ever-young, ever-burning passions ! You 
 are mad." _ 
 
 "If you refuse," said Perez coldly, "he 
 breaks the pact. Then farewell the Fount of 
 Youth ! " 
 
 Don Luis walked up and down the tent in 
 
 219 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 silence, his gathered brow bent downwards, and 
 his fingers twitching unceasingly. 
 
 " It can't be that he'll take no other," he said, 
 stopping suddenly. " I say he must take some 
 one else. Do you realise what it means ? 
 What ! place her in Atalpa's hands for days, 
 perhaps for weeks ? Alone ? The only white ? 
 Among the priests of his blood-stained gods ? 
 Lost in the depths of his frightful Indian 
 cities ? " 
 
 " Atalpa is inexorable," said Perez. " You 
 must choose between this condition and the 
 Fountain of Youth." 
 
 ** You must shake his exaction." 
 
 '* Do you think that I, who am her lover, 
 her betrothed," said the Chief Captain, '' that I, 
 to whom she is dearer than the breath of life, 
 have left one word untried ? — though, indeed, 
 I think there is no danger ; for Atalpa is bound 
 by self-interest to respect her. And now, I 
 say once more, he'll take no other as a hostage. 
 So now I leave you. You have until to-night 
 
 220 
 
The Ambassadors 
 
 to think the matter over. Meanwhile, if 
 you'll wait a little in your own tent, I'll send 
 you one who will help you to come to a 
 decision." 
 
 221 
 
CHAPTER XXIII 
 
 MAGIC 
 
 » 
 
 Once more the Seeker of Youth was alone ; 
 and once more he walked up and down, 
 gnawing his hand in his anguish. 
 
 A great shadow seemed to have fallen 
 upon him, wrapping him round, and changing 
 him utterly. A moment before he had been 
 a man grizzled, indeed, of hair and beard, 
 but still strong and keen and active, in 
 whose eyes the light of a great hope, of a 
 great joy, sparkled as in an overbrimming 
 cup. But now the features were white and 
 drawn and pinched ; the back bent with a 
 hopeless weight ; the step shuffling and 
 listless. He had aged by twenty years. He 
 
 222 
 
Magic 
 
 stretched out his hands with a vague, groping 
 gesture, as if trying to grasp something 
 intangible that he had lost ; then brought 
 them back to his brow, as if to fix some 
 thought that was escaping. 
 
 ''0 God! God!" he cried, "why dost 
 Thou dazzle me with the great triumph of 
 my life, and then snatch away from me the 
 common light of Heaven ? — Eosita as Atalpa's 
 hostage — the only white among countless 
 swarms of Indians, of Indians who have 
 never once seen a living white woman ; the 
 single head round which the waves of their 
 lust may close at any moment ? He said 
 that she was to serve as a pledge that no 
 offence shall be offered to any of their gods 
 and temples. . . . Why, any soldier of my 
 escort may do so in his folly. Or I myself, 
 by a careless gesture, by an unwary word, 
 may rouse the wrath of their priests, and 
 then her life will be forfeit. God, God ! 
 it is too frightful. I can't do it. It would 
 
 223 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 be better to tear up the treaty and reach 
 the Fount by force. How can I place her 
 in such peril ? How can I build my success 
 on my own child's death ? " 
 
 And falling forwards on the bed, he shut 
 out the light of day, but not the horror of 
 the situation. 
 
 He seemed to feel the tiny and invisible 
 spirits of Age plying their inexorable little 
 chisel on the stone of his brow, carving their 
 innumerable wrinkles. He felt them sprinkling 
 their tiny snow-flakes on his whitening head. 
 He felt them blowing on his hand till it 
 trembled like a tremulous tree, and fastening 
 their palsy on his limbs like the fetters of 
 a felon. They perched on his neck and on 
 his shoulder, bending both with their unseen 
 weight, deadening feeling and thought, drawing 
 him in the darkness by a thousand invisible 
 meshes nearer and nearer to the grave. 
 
 How cold he felt ; how numb his heart 
 had become ! How quickly the tide of 
 
 224 
 
Magic 
 
 exultation had ebbed ! Five minutes ago it 
 had thundered at the flow, advancing to 
 victory. And now the heavy waters of his 
 soul were as sluggish as Dead Sea brine. 
 Five minutes back, his conquering hand had 
 been on the mighty prize, about to grasp it 
 victoriously, and his fear for her had stricken 
 it with palsy. . . . 
 
 He heard some one enter, and looked up. 
 An unexpected figure was standing before 
 him, from which he recoiled to the furthest 
 corner of the tent. 
 
 It was a living mummy, covered with 
 minute wrinkles, and black, save for the snow- 
 white tuft on her forehead. She was clad in 
 brilliant yellows and reds ; an enormous snake 
 was winding slowly round her neck, and, 
 guided by her black, shrunken hand, was 
 caressing her hideous face with its forked and 
 restless tongue. Behind her stood the in- 
 terpreter. 
 
 "This is Othoxa, the Priestess of Dark 
 
 225 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 Spirits," said the Indian, " the saturated 
 charmer of deadly snakes. The Chief Captain 
 sends her to impart such knowledge as lies 
 in her cobra- bitten breast about the Spring 
 of Youth." 
 
 "The Spring of Youth?" said the Mystic 
 heavily. " Ah, yes, I remember. She was to 
 come and tell me of the road. How far from 
 here does it lie ? " 
 
 " It lies in the great central forests," answered 
 the Sorceress, when his question had been 
 interpreted ; " a twelve days' march from this, 
 if speed be used. It is hidden in depths which 
 man does well to shun, and where at most some 
 wounded puma laps now and then the healing 
 wave. None know the path, save only Atalpa's 
 mutes, of whom one will be given thee as a 
 guide. They bear the semblance of great youth, 
 but they are ages old. Their tongues were cut 
 more than a thousand years ago, lest they 
 should reveal the secret of the Fount. They and 
 the King alone have ever tasted of its water." 
 
 226 
 
Magic 
 
 " What is the aspect of the Fountain ? " he 
 asked, mastering the horror with which her 
 wrinkled hideousness — the very incarnation of 
 age — filled his soul, and approaching a step 
 nearer. 
 
 " There is nothing by which it could be told 
 from any other," answered Othoxa. '* It looks 
 a simple and natural forest spring, save only 
 this, that if you examine it closer, its depths 
 are strewn with pebbles of virgin gold. Where 
 it wells up, it is of small size ; a mere rippling 
 diamond that nestles in the moss. Beyond, it 
 forms a pool covered with floating flowers, and 
 changes into a dark and unfathomed emerald." 
 
 "Whence did it get its virtue?" he asked 
 again. 
 
 "Some say," answered the Sorceress, "that 
 it has trickled through caverns in which the 
 cunning powers who dwell in the earth prepare 
 the germs of life and the saps of Nature. 
 Others assert that the great and panting God 
 of Generation, the flame-tongued Atapoota, as 
 
 227 
 
The Eomance of the Fountam 
 
 he passed it one day, cooled his dark limbs 
 in its ripples, and gave it his virility even for 
 ever." 
 
 " How many draughts must he who seeks 
 youth take of the spring ? " he asked. 
 
 *' A single draught suffices," said Othoxa, "if 
 taken from the Fountain head, to change the 
 most wrinkled and tottering age into youth's 
 most radiant strength. If I cared to try, it 
 would convert these hideous limbs of mine 
 into limbs of youth and beauty such as thou 
 hast never dreamt of. But I have drunk of 
 other waters, even of those of the Fount of 
 Age, which have given me for ever knowledge 
 and powers that I would not exchange for those 
 thou seekest. Ay, the Fount of Youth is 
 potent. I will give thee a small example of its 
 strength." 
 
 She drew a little phial from her withered 
 bosom. 
 
 *' This," she said, " contains a single drop of 
 brightness from the Spring of Youth, weakened 
 
 228 
 
Magic 
 
 in a hundred times its bulk of common 
 water." 
 
 Don Luis sprang forward, and tried to snatch 
 the phial from her hand. 
 
 *' Give it," he cried wildly, " let me drink it." 
 
 But brandishing the snake round her head, 
 Othoxa repelled the rash attempt, and made 
 him recoil once more into the further corner 
 of the tent. 
 
 " Back, back ! " she shrieked. " This single 
 diluted drop, if drunk in violence and in the 
 teeth of Heaven, would strike thee into ever- 
 lasting dotage, not everlasting youth. But 
 wait ; be patient. Hast thou, perchance, some 
 dry and long-dead thing ? " 
 
 She looked round the tent, as if in search 
 of what she needed. Presently her eye fell 
 on a wreath of black spiked twigs which hung 
 over the Commander's bed. It was a crown 
 of thorns, once belonging to some ancient image 
 of the Crucified Saviour, which an ancestor of 
 his had brought from the East more than a 
 
 229 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 century and a half before, and which the Seeker 
 of Youth carried with him as a protection 
 against evil in the lands of the heathen. Then 
 she pointed to the bowl that stood on the tent 
 table. 
 
 "Fill this with water," she said, "and now 
 take down that wreath." 
 
 He obeyed her without protest, his intense 
 desire to see what she would do mastering his 
 reluctance to disturb the relic. 
 
 " These thorns are very old ? " she asked. 
 
 "They were old when thou wert born," he 
 answered. 
 
 " Well, then," she said, " place the wreath 
 in this bowl, and observe what happens when 
 a drop from the phial is added." 
 
 He laid the black relic in the bowl. It 
 floated lightly on the water. 
 
 " That will do," said the Sorceress ; and she 
 poured into it one bright drop from the phial. 
 
 Don Luis watched, holding his breath. For 
 a half minute nothing took place. Then the 
 
 230 
 
Magic 
 
 wreath suddenly quivered. Little green shoots 
 sprouted up on the black intertwined twigs, 
 between the cruel thorns. Then they grew 
 into leaves, and the little white flowerets of 
 the thorn rapidly changed the black and sapless 
 wreath into a garland as fresh and dewy as if it 
 had been gathered that moment from an April 
 hedge. 
 
 " wondrous sight ! dazzling trans- 
 mutation ! " he cried. 
 
 '' If one drop," said Othoxa, " can work this 
 miracle on dead thorns, think what a cupful 
 from the Fount itself will do for him who quaffs 
 it. And now, farewell for to-day. Before thou 
 startest, we shall meet once more. It is I who 
 am to take thy daughter to the great temple 
 city where Atalpa, Lord of the Pumas, rules 
 in his endless youth, and who will place her 
 as a hostage in his hands. This wreath is 
 thine." 
 
 And with these words, gathering up the 
 lazy coils of the huge python that hung 
 
 231 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 round her neck, the dark wrinkled Sorceress 
 left him. 
 
 He stood, still staring at the flowering crown 
 of thorns, still thunderstruck by the marvellous 
 efflorescence — surely the most glorious and 
 resistless proof that ever dazzled human eyes. 
 What doubts, what hesitations or compunctions, 
 could stand against such a miracle as this ? 
 A minute ago this mass of white blossom, 
 whose breath delighted the passing breeze, had 
 been dry, black wood, charred by age ; the 
 relic of forgotten years. And look at it now, 
 in all its new-born beauty ! . . . How soft, 
 how sweet, how infinitely lovely — the loveliest 
 thing that his eyes had ever gazed on ! 
 
 " God of Youth ! aurora-pinioned Spirit ! " 
 he cried, "forgive thy devotee, if for a single 
 moment he wavered on the pathway that led 
 to thy shrine. Have I not off"ered up, Youth, 
 whatever thou hast claimed — sleep, repose, 
 health, friendship, country, home, and fortune ? 
 And shall I now deny thee what thou askest ? 
 
 232 
 
Magic 
 
 Shall I rebel against thee because of a few 
 hours' risk to Kosita — to Rosita, of the 
 immortalising of whose beauty this miracle is 
 the heavenly pledge? Away with the craven 
 fear. Rositas loveliness in the far years to 
 come — perhaps even centuries from to-day — 
 shall be as bright, as scented, and as dewy as 
 the fragrant wreath before me. The crown 
 of Sorrow is the crown of Hope and Youth. 
 I will lay it on her head." 
 
 233 
 
CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 THE FIGHT ROUND THE LITTER 
 
 As Juan had told Rosita some time before, 
 there was a conspiracy afoot among a part of 
 the men to escape from the camp, march back 
 to the coast, seize one of the ships, and sail 
 away to Europe, or at least to Hispaniola. Of 
 this conspiracy Juan, who considered that he 
 owned no allegiance to the Commander, was 
 himself the soul. To carry away Rosita from 
 the dangers of all sorts which he foresaw for 
 her in the subsequent stages of the expedition, 
 as well as to withdraw her from the molestations 
 of Diego Perez, was more than suflScient reason 
 for his action. The principal motive of the 
 others was jealousy and hatred of the Chief 
 
 234 
 
The Fight Round the Litter 
 
 Captain, who had behaved of late with great 
 harshness and tyranny ; and a growing disbelief 
 in the reality of the Fountain, or even of any 
 notable prize in the way of gold or gems. 
 
 The refusal of Eosita to abandon her father 
 by no means put an end to Juan's share in 
 the preparations and secret discussions of the 
 conspirators. He still hoped to override her 
 objections ; and though he, of course, would 
 have let the others depart without him if her 
 resolve proved unshakable, he felt in any case 
 bound to afford them all the help in his power, 
 especially in the dangerous and difficult matter 
 of securing the necessary Indian guides for the 
 escape to the coast. 
 
 Things were at this point when their action 
 was suddenly precipitated by the news which 
 spread through the camp that Eosita was 
 about to be given up to the enemy as a 
 hostage, while the Commander journied, with 
 a small escort, to the spot where the Fountain 
 was supposed to lie. Indeed, it was soon 
 
 235 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 known that she had already been placed in 
 the hands of Atalpa's Indians, and was to be 
 conveyed — perhaps in a few hours — to the 
 great temple city. 
 
 It now became urgent to carry out the plan 
 at once. Rosita's consent w^as no longer 
 material, and Juan's part was clear. The first 
 step w^as to rescue her at all hazards. He 
 found his fellow-plotters scarcely less anxious 
 to make the attempt than himself. The girl 
 was adored by the little army, and especially 
 by the men who were most devoted to Juan, 
 and who most hated the Chief Captain. 
 
 After hurried conference, the plotters decided 
 that the best plan would be to lie in wait for 
 Rosita's litter and its convoy at a point where 
 they would be obliged to set the litter down 
 on account of some natural obstacle. There 
 was a river which they would have to ford 
 some four or five miles from the camp ; and, 
 on Juan's advice, this spot was selected for 
 the purpose. The Indians who were to form 
 
 236 
 
The Fight Kound the Litter 
 
 her guard would probably not exceed thirty 
 or forty ; but that would be quite double 
 their own number, and each Spaniard knew 
 that he would be matched against at least 
 two of the enemy. 
 
 And so, in the dark forest, by the black 
 overshadowed stream, they waited, where the 
 great crooked branches of the unfamiliar trees 
 stretched across over the water towards each 
 other, and the current of the sunless ford 
 rippled over the shallows with a ceaseless 
 gurgle. As he crouched, holding his breath in 
 the thick leafy underwood, a double force 
 spurred Juan's soul to succeed or die in the 
 doubtful attempt. On the one hand, there was 
 the danger which he realised but too well for 
 Eosita, were she once in the hands of Atalpa 
 — a danger he would have staked his life to 
 avert, even if he had not vaguely suspected 
 foul play. On the other hand, love and 
 liberty, and all the promise of the future, called 
 on him to deliver her for his own sake, and 
 
 237 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 impelled him to win her for himself, and bear 
 her to the coast. 
 
 The moments of waiting seemed endless. 
 But at last a crackling of dead leaves and a 
 few gutteral sounds came to them through 
 the trees, and they sprang to their weapons 
 in silence. They saw the first armed Indians 
 of the escort approach and stop by the ford ; 
 and anon the litter appeared between the 
 leaves. Eosita's white face — whiter than ever 
 by contrast with the black mummy - like 
 features of Othoxa, who sat by her side — 
 looked worn and ill, as her eyes followed 
 absently the movements of her swarthy 
 attendants. As Juan expected, the litter was 
 set down for a few moments while the 
 Indians measured the depth of the stream. 
 The Spaniards knew that, being numerically 
 inferior, death was in defeat. So they fell 
 on the Indians with the suddenness of a 
 thunderbolt. 
 
 The first group, between themselves and 
 
 238 
 
The Fight Round the Litter 
 
 Kosita, were cut down in an instant ; yet not 
 so quickly but that the others had time to 
 throw themselves in front of the litter, round 
 which an inextricable tangle of a struggle took 
 place, body to body, weapon to weapon ; both 
 parties being hampered by the fear of injury 
 to the prize for which they were contending. 
 Could any one have noticed Eosita's face, he 
 would have seen in it no fear for her own 
 self, but only intense anxiety for the fate of 
 one particular figure that was gradually work- 
 ing its way towards her through the melee, 
 . . . Several of the combatants rolled together 
 into the stream, and were swept into its 
 deeper pools, still locking each other in the 
 death-grapple. But every Spaniard that was 
 lost sensibly diminished the chances of the 
 surprise, while the Indians could afford to 
 lose those that fell. 
 
 At last Juan, closely followed by four or 
 five of his men, reached Eosita, and laid his 
 hand on the litter. In another moment she 
 
 239 
 
The Romance of the Foimtain 
 
 would have been his. But just as she was 
 about to leap from the litter into his arms, 
 she saw the swarthy sorcerefs by her side 
 crane suddenly forward towards him, like one 
 of her own black and yellow snakes on the 
 strike, and a knife gleamed before the girl's 
 eyes. Rosita's own dagger was not less quick. 
 It leapt like lightning on Othoxa's stooping 
 form, but too late to prevent her blow. The 
 horrible crone crumpled up like a crushed 
 insect. But Juan's grasp on the litter relaxed. 
 He fell back with closing eyes into the 
 confused mass of combatants, and the litter 
 was borne off by its dark-skinned defenders. 
 At the same moment a fresh squad of Indians 
 — the rearguard of the convoy — appeared on 
 the scene, and with hoarse and hideous shouts 
 joined in the struggle. A few minutes later 
 all was over. The rescue had failed. 
 
 240 
 
CHAPTER XXV 
 
 IN THE ROCK TEMPLE 
 
 A MONTH had scarcely passed since the Feast 
 of Arrows. The innumerable flowers that had 
 clad the great rock temple were scarcely 
 withered, and the sacred gardens had scarcely 
 had time to raise another crop, when, lo ! the 
 garland-girls were busy once again, crouching 
 by hundreds on the pavement for a far greater 
 feast. It was no yearly pageant that called 
 for their skill and their fancy ; but a rite 
 unprecedented in the annals of the dusky race 
 that had carved those columns out of the 
 living rock. It was for the fulfilment of a 
 prophecy centuries old, which Heaven's heralds 
 were ushering in with every portent, sign, and 
 
 241 Q 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 prodigy. For had not the northern sky, three 
 days before, assumed the hue of the pale, thin 
 blood which runs in white men's hearts ; and 
 had not the earth quivered and undulated 
 underfoot ? 
 
 The victim was due to arrive that day at 
 sunset ; and Atalpa was come to watch the 
 garlanding and the preparations for the great 
 procession and the sacred dances. Everything, 
 the High Priest told him, would be ready by 
 the stated moment, and all would be on a 
 scale befitting the greatness of the occasion. 
 A hundred virgins, taken from the darkest of 
 the tribes, with panther - skins and with 
 anklets of red gold, were to lead her to the 
 altar of Destruction. The troops of warriors 
 had been selected among the very finest. The 
 companies of priests, too, were ready, in new 
 sacrificial robes of spotless linen. The snake- 
 charmers and the sacred jugglers were greater 
 in number than the oldest man could recollect. 
 Countless flowers of every shape and colour 
 
 242 
 
In the Rock Temple 
 
 had been collected to strew on the victim's 
 path. As for the dances, the javelin - men 
 were practising all day a gigantic reel of 
 death, to be danced round the victim in the 
 hall of the three hundred columns. Then a 
 dance of snake-men and sorcerers round about 
 her, with many new varieties of dreadful 
 movement. The sorcerers were to show in 
 their fumes spirits as yet unknown, and the 
 shadows of demons in a lurid haze. Never 
 had the Flower of Destruction had so great 
 and dreadful a pageant since the first shudder- 
 ing slave had been offered up to the great 
 Executioner and Goddess fresh from the 
 boundless forests. 
 
 ''And the chants?" asked Atalpa. 
 
 "The beauty and cruelty of Nature," answered 
 the High Priest, ''will be expressed in a great, 
 slow death-dirge, which will be intoned as 
 the great procession winds along to the slow 
 boom of the Gong of Gongs. The heavy 
 odour and resistless strength of the Dread 
 
 243 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 Flower will be praised in new sacrificial hymns 
 as we approach her altar, and as we lay the 
 white victim in her lap." 
 
 " Good," said the ever-young King. '' But, 
 while thou hast been preparing all these 
 flowers, and hast been giving all thy thoughts 
 to the procession, the chants, the dances, 1 
 on my side have not been idle, but have been 
 maturing in the shade the other half of this 
 great work of death : the ambush to which 
 the great White Chief, tempted by the 
 promise of a magic spring, is to be drawn in 
 the depths of the mighty forest. I have 
 chosen as the fittest spot the dark, ever- 
 memorable pool known as the Fount of the 
 Yellow Spirits, where the tribe of Hara was 
 massacred to a man sixty years ago. The 
 huge trees that cluster round the solitary 
 water are hollow one and all, and each of 
 them can hold a dozen silent warriors now as 
 then, and the loneliness not lessened. His 
 escort will be small, and although they carry 
 
 244 
 
In the Kock Temple 
 
 the thunder-pealing weapons that make them 
 invincible elsewhere, the trees will be in our 
 favour, and can hide more warriors in their 
 hollow trunks than the massacre requires." 
 
 "The spot is well chosen," answered the 
 High Priest. "May the ambush prove as 
 successful as the one which ended the accursed 
 tribe of Hara ! " 
 
 Their conversation was interrupted by the 
 entrance of a messenger. The white maiden, 
 he announced, would arrive at sunset, if all 
 went well. He himself had hastened on faster 
 than she could be borne on her litter. The 
 wounded would arrive on the morrow by slower 
 stages. 
 
 " The wounded ! " exclaimed Atalpa. 
 
 As they had been fording the river of Green 
 Snakes — the messenger explained — at sunset on 
 the day they started, a sudden and desperate 
 attempt had been made to rescue the white 
 maiden. Twice the whites had surrounded her 
 litter, got possession of it, and borne it away, 
 
 245 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 and twice it had been snatched back ; until at 
 last, by dint of numbers, and with the help of 
 javelin-hurling spirits, she had been saved for 
 the Goddess at the price of many lives. The 
 leader of the onslaught, one of the white men's 
 younger chiefs, badly wounded, had been 
 captured with three of his companions, and 
 they were being brought to swell the show. 
 
 *' It was a wise thought to spare them for 
 the torture," said Atalpa. '' They can be 
 carried in the great procession, and then 
 handed over to the tormentors. This attempt 
 at her rescue, although it has failed, makes 
 me uneasy lest the ambush for the destruction 
 of her father should be upset by some unfore- 
 seen event. I must increase the number of 
 warriors that I am sending to the lonely pool. 
 They must be six to one." 
 
 *'Yes," answered the High Priest. "An 
 ambush that is laid with insuflScient forces is 
 only a trap laid against oneself. But if thou 
 would'st watch the dances that are being 
 
 246 
 
In the Rock Temple 
 
 practised, come with me, and thou shalt see the 
 great wild reel of death that is just beginning. 
 I hear already its roar of horror. It rises from 
 the crypts like the vague boom of a distant 
 whirlpool." 
 
 247 
 
CHAPTER XXVI 
 
 THE DUNGEON 
 
 RosiTA lay in one of the rock-hewn dungeons, 
 deep below the great many-pillared halls of 
 the Temple of Destruction. How dark it was, 
 she thought, how cold ! Surely they might 
 have given her a little light. And yet, what 
 did it matter ? Could a soul not grope its 
 way to Heaven in the dark ? Perhaps God 
 saw us better in the blackness, even as we see 
 fire-flies. She was free to think. The agony 
 was over, and she was ready. The martyrdom 
 of the spirit was gone through ; there awaited 
 her but the martyrdom of the flesh. But oh, 
 how keen had been the struggle ! She wondered 
 
 248 
 
The Dungeon 
 
 whether her hair had turned white in the last 
 three days. She hoped to God that it had. 
 She would fain go to Heaven with the badge 
 of holy Age, pure and snowy, on her brow ; 
 not in the livery of hateful Youth. Since she 
 must die before the coming of the wrinkles, 
 at least let her die white-headed. She felt as 
 calm as the most peaceful and contented eld 
 that ever died at ninety ; and she could have 
 smiled if only she could have known that he 
 was safe in Heaven, and waiting for her there. 
 Ah, if she but knew that he was out of reach 
 of Indian torture ! For, if he was not dead, 
 then surely they held him, and she would 
 never know. How nearly he had succeeded in 
 rescuing her. . . . Why, in that horrible 
 struggle round the litter, there had been a 
 moment when he had grasped her wrist, just as 
 Othoxa's knife struck him. But, God, God ! 
 let her not think of it ! it shook her courage, 
 and she was bound to die with decent strength. 
 She must not flinch under that great, black 
 
 249 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 vault that held her as in the concave hand 
 of Fate. This was the identical temple of 
 her dream — the temple of the soul-crushing 
 columns, hewn in the living rock. She knew 
 each step she had to take. She knew the 
 hideous end. And now the quicker she died 
 the better. How rosy the summits of old age 
 appeared from this dark gorge of young and 
 violent death ! She had thought to climb them 
 hand in hand, she and he ; and, sitting in the 
 sunset, to look upon the plain of life stretched 
 out beneath them, and on the path which 
 they had slowly climbed. But it was not to 
 be. 
 
 Strange ! There came to her in the 
 impenetrable darkness of the dungeon — was 
 it fancy born of her thoughts ? — something 
 like a faint and distant echo of his voice. 
 Perhaps he was calling her from the other 
 world. She strained her ear to listen. ** 
 love, I come," she murmured. 
 
 Then, through the darkness, muffled and 
 
 260 
 
The Dungeon 
 
 faint in the distance, there came to her the 
 words, ''To drink." 
 
 "0 God!" she cried, "his earthly voice — 
 God ! uphold me ! " for she was staggering. 
 
 But she braced herself against her faintness, 
 and began to grope her way towards the voice. 
 Then she caught the sound of difficult breathing, 
 and, groping on, laid her hand on an unseen 
 face; unseen, but known, only too well. 
 
 "Each time I speak," he whispered, "it 
 makes the blood well up. The wound is through 
 
 the lung " 
 
 "0 God!" she thought, "uphold me, up- 
 hold me! It is I; it^ is Eosita!" she said 
 
 aloud. 
 
 '' Is this Hell," he said, " and are you come 
 
 from Heaven ? " 
 
 "No," she answered, crouching beside him, 
 and laying his head with infinite care in her 
 lap ; " this place is neither earth nor Hell, but 
 Heaven's lobby. Nor am I come from Heaven, 
 though we are going there. The door of death 
 
 251 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 is about to open, and has still to be passed 
 through. I cannot see you. Oh for a little 
 light to see his face once more — I wonder, is 
 this great pain or boundless joy?" 
 
 " There is a jug of water near me. I have 
 not the strength to lift it," he murmured. 
 
 She groped for it, and put it to his lips. 
 "It is almost full," she said. 
 
 " This is the Draught of Youth," he whispered ; 
 " for those who drink of it never reach old 
 age." 
 
 '' And I am come to share it," she answered. 
 " Is this draught the sweetest or the bitterest 
 I have ever quaffed?" she thought. "But 
 whether it be bitter or sweet," she added, 
 " better this brackish water in common here, 
 on the boundary of the land of shadows, than 
 that great lonely draught for which he is 
 thirsting." 
 
 Juan tried to raise himself on his elbow ; 
 tried to struggle up. 
 
 " If he were not your father, I would curse 
 
 252 
 
The Dungeon 
 
 him from the deepest abysses of my soul," he 
 said, '' for having brought you here." 
 
 ** Oh, don't curse him," she cried. " Don't 
 curse what I love, here on death's brink. He 
 knows not what he does." 
 
 '' love, love, if only you had let me save 
 you when all was ready planned," Juan said. 
 
 " It mio-ht not be," she answered. 
 
 '' My God ! to think that we might now be 
 half across the ocean," he went on, ''with the 
 helm turned full on life. — It is too horrible. 
 And if Hell holds " 
 
 ''Hush, hush!" she implored, "you mustn't 
 speak, or you'll burst your wound afresh. A 
 little more of this existence, or a little less ; 
 it will all be one in a few fleeting years. It 
 would have been passing sweet, no doubt, to 
 tread the path of life together hand in hand. 
 I think I should have made you a good wife. 
 I would have tried to be the sunshine of your 
 house — the soother of your cares, your good 
 adviser, the wise mother and trainer of your 
 
 253 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 children ; the thrifty dispenser of your growing 
 fortune, until you and I, at last grown old 
 together, would have sat by the fire in life's 
 long winter evenings talking of old, sweet 
 memories. Or else, to the gentle humming 
 of my wheel, with all the little grandchildren 
 gathered round us, close to the crackling logs 
 and the leaping shadows, I should have let 
 the twilight creep and deepen about us, and 
 told them fairy tales as I spun. Shall I tell 
 you one now ? Let me see : what shall I tell 
 you ? Shall I tell you of the little maiden who, 
 once on a time, wove herself a dress of sun- 
 beams ? And how the wicked envious fairies 
 came and stole it away in the night ? And how, 
 as she was standing in the high rippling corn tell- 
 ing her sorrows to the friendly little field-mouse, 
 a fairy prince came by and saw her, and gave her 
 a kiss, and how he came day after day, and at 
 last carried her away in a fairy coach ? " 
 
 " I think we are standing in the corn," he 
 murmured. " It rises to your shoulder. . . . 
 
 254 
 
The Dungeon 
 
 It is sunset. . . . The grain stretches away 
 in miles of gold. . . . And every now and 
 then a great, slow wave of it rolls past us as 
 the evening breeze rises. . . . The air is full 
 of heat and ripeness. ... A million insects 
 are chirping round about us. . . . At intervals 
 there comes from a distance a gust of reapers' 
 song. The fairy coach has come too soon. . . . 
 Something is breaking in my bosom. . . . Put 
 your lips to mine, that my soul may kiss 
 them as it flies away. ..." 
 
 Then there was silence ; silence that was 
 broken only at long intervals by a solitary 
 sob. She crouched over his body, passing her 
 hands over it, and feeling the warmth die out 
 of it quickly or slowly — she did not know. 
 She had thought that she was in the dark ; 
 and now it seemed as if the light had been 
 suddenly snuffed out. Was there a dark that 
 was darkness to darkness ? A dark compared 
 with which the darkness of night was what 
 sunlight is to night herself? His hand was 
 
 255 
 
The Romance of the Foimtam 
 
 as heavy as a hand of clay. He did not 
 answer, nor move, nor moan, nor breathe. 
 She heard but her own breathing. He was 
 dead. What ! leave his love behind him in 
 the darkness ? Brush rudely past her through 
 the narrow gate of Heaven ? Oh, if only for 
 this once, he was unmannerly, and she would 
 scold him in the wide fields above. Was she 
 a little mad ? . . . There was a maiden who 
 wove herself a garment of the sunbeams ; and 
 when they stole it, she went and told her 
 sorrows to the nibbling field-mice in the tall 
 ripe corn. Here, in this dungeon, there were 
 only nibbling rats. Let them come forth to 
 mourn with her a little as she sat by the 
 dead. love, love ! if only she had the 
 poppies and the wild flowers that twine about 
 the wheat, there in the auburn fields where 
 his lips had first touched hers ; or woodland 
 bells fresh from the sweet dewy mosses to lay 
 upon his body, now that he was dead ! . . . 
 Nothing ; nothing ! But she could still sing 
 
 256 
 
The Dungeon 
 
 him the summer song he had loved. She 
 would make the bright green hazels wave 
 above him still. 
 
 "The wild bee is humming; 
 The woodpecker drumming; 
 My sweetheart is coming 
 Through summer to me; 
 
 The nutters are nutting 
 Till summer day's shutting; 
 And now he is cutting 
 My name on a tree. 
 
 The wood- dove is cooing 
 And billing and wooing ; 
 And now we are doing 
 As doeth the dove; 
 
 The squirrels are clinging 
 Where hazels are swinging, 
 And all of us singing 
 And playing at love." 
 
 Ah ! there was no light here in these crypts ; 
 no sunshine, no mercy, no hope. And if they 
 buried him where he had died, no breeze 
 would ever whisper to him in his loneliness. 
 
 257 R 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 When once they had taken her away, silence 
 and darkness would have him for ever. 
 
 But, lo ! a brightness was stealing upon her 
 soul. Was it light or music, or both ? Was 
 there a dawn, she thought, that can shine 
 through solid stone, and set at naught temple 
 walls like these ? Who was lifting those 
 crushing vaults from above her, to let her 
 see the sunrise ? Overhead was a great sea 
 of amber, of rose, of gold, where angel faces 
 as numberless as bubbles, appeared and dis- 
 appeared again so quickly that the eye could 
 scarce watch them amid the reefs of glowing 
 jacinth and the isles of beryl that shifted and 
 changed with every passing minute in a 
 dazzling corruscation. Was it the sea that 
 they had once dreamt to live in for evermore, 
 as merman and mermaid, far from earthly 
 sorrows ? 
 
 From the amber of the sunrise a chorus of 
 Dawn Spirits were calling her to come where 
 earth's heartache and sobs had no place ; 
 
 258 
 
The Dungeon 
 
 where the sou] struggled no longer like a bird 
 shaking its cage ; where life's song had died 
 away, and youth and eld were now one ; 
 where the old counted not their winters, and 
 the young would not grow old. 
 
 Then the angel voices died away. The amber 
 of the great seas of glory overhead died back 
 into the dungeon's darkness. But her soul was 
 now strong and peaceful. The darkness was 
 no longer as of iron, but seemed rather to hold 
 her like the warm ripe gloom of summer woods 
 at night. As she knelt, and held his heavy 
 clay hand in hers, she could almost fancy him 
 asleep, not dead, and his head resting softly 
 on some sweet and mossy forest pillow. She 
 scarcely dared to breathe lest she should wake 
 him. What trees were spreading above them ? 
 What flowers were scattered round them, wait- 
 ing for the light to open their bells? What 
 fairies were circling round them on the grass 
 to charm his sleep? And he was dead, quite 
 dead. Nevermore would he and she sit listen- 
 
 259 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 ing in the forest. Dead, dead ; quite dead ; for 
 ever, ever more. And slie was waiting to be 
 fetched for death herself. Hark, hark ! they 
 were coming. She heard a tramp of feet echoing 
 through the crypts. They were coming to fetch 
 her, and she was ready. 
 
 A red glare leapt upon the arches of the 
 vault, as the Master of the Sacrifices entered, 
 accompanied by many priests and other Indians 
 bearing torches and leather thongs. 
 
 " Are both her wrists well fastened, and are 
 we ready?" he said, presently. 
 
 " Where are the thongs to fasten my soul ? " 
 she thought. 
 
 " I hear the Gong of Gongs beginning to 
 boom," the Master said to his priests. " Form 
 in order of procession, that we may gather, 
 as we go along, all the hundred affluents of 
 our human stream, till it rolls in waves of men 
 like a great river that rolls to the ocean." 
 
 " Death's sea of gold is expanding at my 
 feet," murmured Rosita. 
 
 260 
 
The Dungeon 
 
 And then, as the great procession wound 
 along, there rose a dull, slow chant of " Lo, the 
 Victim ! We bring her to the Goddess, to the 
 Destroyer. We bring her to the murderous 
 Beauty, to the Flower of Cruelty, to the 
 wondrous Executioner of Nature." 
 
 261 
 
CHAPTER XXVII 
 
 BY THE MAGIC BRINK. 
 
 Meanwhile Don Luis was on his way to the 
 Fountain. 
 
 Mter twelve or thirteen days' continuous 
 marching, the dumb guide who led him and 
 his small escort through the great forests at 
 last stopped unexpectedly, and pointed to a 
 gleam of water through the trees. 
 
 A trembling came over the pale, mystic-eyed 
 Dreamer, and the heart in his breast beat to 
 bursting. If only joy did not end his life 
 before he had time to drain the draught, and 
 cheat him of his conquest, he thought ; for he 
 knew that the goal was now reached, and what 
 that water meant. 
 
 262 
 
By the Magic Brink 
 
 ** Good Carpaza," he said to the lieutenant 
 of the escort, " I pray thee, let the soldiers and 
 the dumb guide wait for me here, under these 
 mighty branches and within call. I would fain 
 reach the margin of the Fountain alone, and 
 not be watched." 
 
 And so he walked on alone towards the magic 
 brink, rather controlling than hurrying his steps. 
 He felt it due to the solemnity of the great act 
 he was about to perform to be sober in this 
 mighty moment ; and in the last supreme and 
 awful minutes that Age and he kept company, 
 to choose the pace that Age should keep. 
 
 What giant trees ! Every one of them seemed 
 to be centuries old. Strange, he thought, if 
 this forest should be the Wood of Ancients 
 after all? If each of these grim trees had 
 once been a man in whose breast the belief in 
 Youth had died, then truly had they been 
 Titans. Youth, Youth ! it was not he whose 
 feet would turn into roots, whose arms would 
 turn into boughs, for want of faith in the 
 
 263 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 Rosy Power. " But, my heart," he cried, 
 " thump not so fiercely in my chest, or all 
 will end too soon." 
 
 How lone it was, how silent under the trees ! 
 It almost struck one with a chill, though the 
 air was hot. It was as he had expected : no 
 signs or shapes of magic surrounded the Fount. 
 It looked mere natural water, like any other 
 solitary fountain of the forest. No guarding 
 dragons circled all round about it, with golden 
 scales ceaselessly clashing. No evil angels 
 sat on its margin to mirror their dusky 
 pinions in its wave. Nothing was there 
 but the infinite loneliness and loveliness of 
 Nature. 
 
 And now he was standing on its very brink — 
 on the brink of Youth. And again he called 
 on his heart not to burst its dwelling in its 
 great emotion ; but let the' beauty and the 
 silence soothe it till he could drain the 
 draught with a steady hand. 
 
 A single ray of sunlight struck down through 
 
 264 
 
By the Magic Brink 
 
 the branches to the clear recesses of the pool. 
 How infinitely limpid was the water before 
 him. It seemed like an Indian emerald 
 melted. Down in the depths yellow spots 
 were quivering. Those must surely be the 
 pebbles of pure gold. There were lilies float- 
 ing on the surface. No doubt they were 
 immortal ; for how could Death float upon the 
 Fount of Youth ? — Yes, he was actually 
 standing by the Fount of Founts, by the 
 brightness of the Gem of Gems ; on the spot 
 that he had seen in dreams by day and night 
 through the long years of yearning. At last 
 he could throw the image of his face on the 
 mirror of Eternal Youth. And he was in 
 time ; he was in time. . . . Now he would 
 kneel, and cast one long, long, lingering look 
 of final farewell on his whitening hair and 
 whitening beard before he lifted the golden 
 cup on high in one inefiable libation. 
 
 But he suddenly drew back. Ha ! what was 
 that ? What trick was the water playing ? 
 
 265 
 
The Eomance of the Fountain 
 
 Strange, very strange ; though, of course, it 
 was mere fancy. Down at the bottom, in 
 the crystal depths, as his eye was sounding 
 the brightness of the trembling water, he had 
 thought he saw a skeleton. Of course, it was 
 his fancy. His senses were overheated with 
 excitement, and saw a nightmare even in the 
 Fount of Youth. And yet the glimpse of 
 horror had been strangely vivid. Now he 
 could see nothing but the golden pebbles that 
 paved the bottom of the pool, like the golden 
 dreams under a sleeper's smile. Oh, there was 
 nothing but splendour in those depths, light 
 and glory and radiance and rapture and joy. 
 There was nothing but triumph and life and 
 boundless exultation ; nothing but the dazzling 
 gifts that a rapid hour could heap at once on 
 one delighted head. Horror dwelt not in the 
 shrine of Youth. 
 
 He took a golden cup from his bosom ; 
 filled it from the pool, and held it up. His 
 face was transfigured ; rapture flooded his 
 
 266 
 
By the Magic Brink 
 
 features, making tliem twenty years younger, 
 though his lips had not touched the draught. 
 
 *' Youth, Son of the Dawn Cloud," he cried, 
 **thou meteor-footed Spirit; thou with the 
 diamond eyes, through whom all Nature lives 
 and breathes and enjoys; for whom all life was 
 kindled ; apart from whom there is nothing 
 but wreck and rubbish, but impotence, regret, 
 and lonely care ; thou that art lord of every 
 sense and every power; thou for whose sole 
 enchantment the whiteness and the witchery 
 of woman, her kisses and her cajolery^ were 
 made ; thou for whose joyous thirst the 
 vintage of Sicily and Cyprus pours its streams 
 of running ruby, of trickling topaz ; for whose 
 delight the lightning-sandaled dances leap and 
 fly and circle, and the soaring songs pierce 
 Midnight's vault ; thou for whom the fiery 
 battle-steed waits — yea, and every straining 
 hound, every pouncing falcon — oh make me 
 young ! 
 
 ** If I have sought thee with the burning fire 
 
 267 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 of unspeakable love ; if I have given thee the 
 numberless dreams, the thoughts, the terrors, 
 the pantings of a lifetime ; the sleep of night, 
 the repose of day ; if I have wasted all my 
 natural youth in seeking thine that never dies ; 
 if I have reached thee over unsounded seas, 
 over undiscovered lands, by the same force that 
 makes the moth flutter round the flame, grant 
 me my prayer. Snatch from my forehead the 
 wrinkled mask of Age ; send through my veins 
 thy immense wave of life, and let me be trans- 
 formed by thy radiance, now that I stand by 
 thy limpid shrine and drink thy health in 
 thy own clear emerald, divine and dazzling 
 Spirit ! " 
 
 Again he raised the cup, and was about to 
 put it to his lips, when a shower of arrows 
 from invisible hands struck the grass and the 
 water all around him. One of the arrows 
 lodged in his hip. He staggered and fell. 
 The golden cup dropped from his hand and 
 rolled into the pool. 
 
 268 
 
 i 
 
By the Magic Brink 
 
 " my God ! " he cried. '' Treachery ! 
 Treachery ! Help ! Help ! '' 
 
 The soldiers of his escort ran up at his cries. 
 Two of them laid him on the grass a few 
 paces from the brink, and, while the others 
 engaged the Indians, endeavoured to extract 
 the arrow. 
 
 **0 God! God! what intolerable pain," 
 he murmured hoarsely. "The fire of Hell is 
 in my hip. ..." 
 
 And he fainted. 
 
 ''It's an ugly wound; but it's not mortal," 
 one of the soldiers said presently, " unless the 
 arrow is poisoned." 
 
 '' If it is," answered the other, " take care not 
 to cut thyself with it." 
 
 And they continued their efforts to extract it. 
 It was a difficult task, and took some time. At 
 last they got it out. The flow of blood that 
 ensued partially restored the wounded man to 
 consciousness. He opened his eyes, and looked 
 at the men who were kneeling beside him. But 
 
 269 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 he did not see them. If he saw anything, it 
 was an inner vision. 
 
 " There is Death at the bottom of the Fount," 
 he muttered. "Death, deep under the water- 
 lilies." 
 
 Suddenly his eye caught the gleam of 
 the pool. Intelligence leaped back into his 
 face. 
 
 "The water! The water!" he cried wildly. 
 " I had not drunk. I tell you I had not 
 drunk." 
 
 He stretched his hands towards it, and tried 
 to struggle to his feet; but fell heavily back 
 upon the grass. 
 
 " Will no one bring me a little of the water ? " 
 he implored. " One drop, only one drop, one 
 tiny drop. ... my God ! if only I could 
 keep my feet." 
 
 The appeal of a lifetime was in his voice ; 
 the master passion of a soul was pleading in 
 his eyes. 
 
 The sound of the fighting had moved far 
 
 270 
 
By the Magic Brink 
 
 away from the pool. All was solitary and 
 peaceful around them. 
 
 '' A little of the water ! A little of the 
 water ! " he repeated. 
 
 One of the men went down to the margin, 
 filled his steel cap with the sparkling liquid; 
 brought it, bucket - fashion, by the leather 
 strap, and held it to the wounded man's 
 mouth. 
 
 " At last ! At last ! " the Dreamer panted, 
 between the long draughts that he took. . . . 
 "I thank Thee, my God." 
 
 He shut his eyes for a moment. The 
 soldier who was supporting his head whispered 
 something to his companion, and, with a 
 meaning look, pointed to the wound. A 
 bluish- green circle was forming round about it. 
 
 " Ah ! " whispered the other, '* that decides 
 it. It's the same poison that killed Pedrillo 
 and Gomez. It causes a wonderful ex- 
 citement. Then you suddenly feel sleepy 
 and die." 
 
 271 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 " I feel the inefifable bounding through my 
 veins," Don Luis murmured. ** It has swept 
 away the pain. I feel nothing but delight. 
 It is a delicious, indescribable sensation. 
 What rapture ! I see the infinite future 
 spreading like a golden plain before me. It 
 is Youth ! It is Youth ! It is Life, with 
 all its boundless possibilities of joy ; its 
 measureless chances of triumph ! Look at my 
 hands ! They are growing white and round ; 
 the creases upon them are disappearing. . . . 
 I am being transformed, transfigured. ..." 
 
 He tried to find something in his bosom, 
 but his rapidly -swelling fingers were unequal 
 to the task. 
 
 " Good fellow, thou wilt find a phial in my 
 doublet," he said faintly. ^' Fill it from the 
 Fountain. It is for my daughter, for my 
 dauorhter Rosita. You all know how beautiful 
 she is. Now her beauty will be safe from 
 time, safe from time for ever. And, good 
 fellow, drink thyself. . . . Men will say some 
 
 272 
 
By the Magic Brink 
 
 day that thou didst share Don Luis de 
 Medrana's first draught. ..." 
 
 The sky was beginning to glow with the 
 sunset. The huge old tree-trunks that sur- 
 rounded the pool stood out black and sharp 
 against the background of gold. Above them 
 innumerable cloudlets, like the down of angels' 
 wings, formed a great shoal of glory, while 
 the pool itself suddenly caught the glow and 
 flamed up like a tarn of crimson. 
 
 " The sunrise," he murmured, '' the sunrise 
 of the new transcendent life. . . . The 
 golden gates of the world of Youth. . . . 
 How infinitely buoyant I feel. . . . How the 
 springs of life seem to ripple within me. ..." 
 
 He paused, and remained silent for some 
 moments. When he spoke again, his tone 
 had changed. 
 
 "The light is too dazzling ..." he said 
 
 feebly. "It exhausts me. . . . My eyes 
 
 cannot bear the splendour. ... I am still 
 
 too weak from the wound. ... It has all 
 
 273 
 
The Romance of the Fountain 
 
 been too sudden, too overwhelming. ... I 
 am growing drowsy. ... I think I could 
 sleep. ..." 
 
 And with a rapturous smile of infinite 
 sw^eetness and peace he closed his eyes for 
 ever on the world of Youth and Age. Then 
 the sun, rolling over the brink of the horizon 
 on its inexorable way, left the w^an twilight 
 to deepen slowly on the undying and ever- 
 renovated forest. 
 
 274 
 
Printed at 
 
 The Edinburgh Press 
 
 9& II Young Street 
 
T. FISHER UNWIN'S NEW NOVELS. 
 
 Crown 8vOy Clothe 6/-. 
 oooo 
 
 A Pagan's Love. By Constance Clyde. 
 
 This novel deals with Australian city life from a new and realistic point of view. So 
 far novelists have given us the Australian bushman, the Australian swagsman, and the 
 like ; but this is an attempt to depict the Australian woman as a national type, and to 
 show both her strength and her weakness. The story opens in New Zealand, where, 
 through a curious combination of circumstances, the heroine is erroneously thought to 
 be desperately in love with the local "minister." She flies to Sydney, and her vicissi- 
 tudes in the proletariat world form part of the book. There is a strong love interest 
 throughout the novel, and, while tragedy is not absent, there is humour in its delineation 
 of Colonial life ; and the book is peculiarly interesting as revealing the freer range of 
 thought and action which characterises the Younger Nation. 
 
 The Yarn of Old Harbour Town, A Sea Romance. 
 
 By W. Clark Russell, author of "The Romance of a Midship- 
 man," etc., etc. Crown 8vo, cloth. [Red Cloth Library.] 
 
 Mr. Clark Russell is facih pnnceps among living writers of sea romances. His new 
 book is, like his other stories, fresh, healthy, and full of vivid descriptions and exciting 
 incidents. The period is the early years of the nineteenth century. In Old Harbour 
 Town lives, with his daughter Lucy, Captain Acton, a retired sea officer, who has two 
 ships trading to the West Indies. Near by lives his old shipmate and intimate friend, 
 Admiral Sir Charles Lawrence. The admiral has a son who is a brilliant sailor but a 
 wild spendthrift, and who is passionately in love with Lucy Acton. Captain Acton gives 
 the command of one of his ships to Lawrence, who conspires to kidnap Lucy and run 
 away with the vessel. Lucy is carried ofl, but to save herself feigns madness, and her 
 acting is so marvellously fine that she imposes upon her kidnapper. Her father and 
 Admiral Lawrence follow in pursuit, and after many thrilling adventures the story ends 
 with an unexpected but satisfactory denouement. 
 
 By Beach and Bogland. By janb barlow. Author of 
 
 " Irish Idylls," etc. With Frontispiece. Crown 8vo, cloth. 
 
 [Green Cloth Library. 
 
 The scene of these stories of Irish peasant-life is laid in the west of Ireland, mostly on 
 the shores of the Atlantic, where sea-fishing and the fanning of the bogland yield a living 
 of the poorest and plainest. Lacking the excitements of town-dwellers, the Irish peasant 
 finds interest in simple things, and so has preserved almost untouched by time a mysticism 
 which finds expression in quaint legends of the dim woods and marshlands, a humour 
 with a hint of tears, and an overflowing kindness of heart bubbling over in infectious 
 gaiety. 
 
 •1, PATERNOSTER BUILDINGS, LONDON, E.G. 
 
T. FISHER UN WIN'S NEW NOVELS. 
 
 The Siren's Net. By Florence Roosevelt. Crown 8vo, 
 cloth. [Red Cloth Library.] 
 
 This novel of Bohemian life in Paris tells of the adventures, failures, and achievements 
 of girls studying for an operatic career. The difficulties and risks which they have to 
 face, the charlatanry of teachers, and later the vicissitudes of professional life, are drawn 
 in a very convincing i ly, many of the events being transcripts of actual fact. While 
 developing a central story of great interest and animation the work sheds a searching 
 light on the position of the girl student in Paris, and especially of the student of music. 
 The book Is dedicated to the President of the United States, of whom the author is a 
 kinswoman. 
 
 A Song of a Single Note. By Amelia E. Barr Crown 8vo. 
 cloth. [Red Cloth Library.] 
 
 Like most of Mrs. Barr's books, this is a love story with a historical setting. The period 
 is the American War of Independence, and the tale begins " in the fourth year of the 
 captivity of New York," when the town was held by the troops of King George under 
 General Clinton. Maria Semple, the heroine, is a young girl of Scottish descent, who 
 has been put by her father under the charge of her grandparents, old and respected resi- 
 dents of New York, Finally, after other less lasting attachments, she becomes the wife of 
 an English nobleman and settles in England. The scenes are mainly laid in New York, and 
 Mrs. Barr gives a most vivid and interesting picture of the city in those troublous times, 
 and of the feelings which inspired its inhabitants. Some notable character sketches of 
 historical figures, as, for instance, General Clinton, will be found in the book. 
 
 Lucie and I. By Henriettb Corkran, Author of " Celebrities 
 and I," "Oddities and I," etc. Crown 8vo, cloth. 
 
 [Red Cloth Library. 
 
 The scenes in this story are laid chiefly in France, Italy and Switzerland, and the book 
 contains many vivid descriptions of Continental ways and manners. It is cast in the 
 form of an autobiography, the narrator being Gabrielle Araory, the only daughter of an 
 English savant settled in Paris and married to a frivolous and heartless Frenchwoman. 
 The novel is mainly concerned with the rivalry between Gabrielle and her cousin Lucie 
 an incarnation of seductive and dangerous femininity, whose fascination threatens to rob 
 Lucie of the love of the man on whom her heart has been set from childhood upwards. 
 The characterisation is exceptionally vivid ; there is much brilliant dialogue, and many 
 pages in the book read like actual reminiscences. 
 
 Tom Gerrard. By Louis Beckb. Crown Svo, cloth. [Red 
 Cloth Library.] 
 
 Mr. Becke here gives a vivid portrayal of Australian life and adventure in the 
 " sixties." The scene of the tale is in the torrid regions of North Queensland, and Tom 
 Gerrard, the bachelor cattle squatter, and his little orphaned niece Mary, are the 
 principal characters in a novel that depicts with the author's usual skill — derived from 
 local knowledge and experience— a country that, although a part of the Empire, has been 
 too little written about. The love story of Kate Fraser and her hard-riding, big-hearted 
 wooer, Gerrard, is delightful to read. 
 
 II. PATERNOSTER BUILDINGS, LONDON, B.C. 
 
T. FISHER UNWINDS NEW NOVELS. 3 
 
 Stolen Waters* By Lucas Cleeve, Author of "Blue Lilies," 
 
 " The Fool-Killer," etc. Crown 8vo, cloth. 
 
 [Red Cloth Library. 
 
 The central figure in this book is almost worshipped by his parishioners as an embodi* 
 ment of elevated piety ; a rich man who had given up luxury for the austere daily 
 round of clerical life, celibate, handsome, manly, tolerant, and a preacher whose 
 pleading reaches all hearts. But there is a secret taint in him which is invisible to all 
 but the one black sheep of his congregation, a woman who has sinned, and repenting 
 believes that all wickedness, however secret, must be revealed by " the candle of the 
 Lord," and that the nobler life is to bear the consequences of such sins. The curious 
 tangle of circumstances by which the outcast becomes the spiritual guide of the pastor 
 forms a motif of much interest. 
 
 The House by the River. By Florence Warden, Author 
 of "The House on the Marsh," "The Mis-Rule of Three," etc. 
 Crown 8vo, cloth. 
 
 The heroine of this sensational romance is a typewriter girl, to whom various strange 
 things happen : her husband deserts her on the wedding morning and disappears ; she 
 goes to a lonely house in the country, " Riverscourt " ; here she is shot at; later she is 
 thrust into a wing of the house which is on fire, and is only saved by a private detective 
 living in the house disguised as a footman. Many other startling events occur ere the 
 story reaches a satisfactory conclusion. Every chapter contains a thrilling situation, and 
 the book is full of ingeniously devised surprises. With its skilfully constructed plot and 
 wealth of exciting incidents the work must count among the besi things Florence Warden 
 has done, and it will undoubtedly hold her public from start to finish. 
 
 Three Dukes. By G. Ystridde. Crown Svo, cloth. [Red 
 Cloth Library.] 
 
 As a description of every day life among the Russian upper classes this book is 
 3f particular interest at the present time. It is the story of a pretty English girl who goes 
 IS governess in the family of an eccentric and grim Russian noble. Her pupils are both 
 jver twenty, and their mother, an ignorant, hysterical woman, is most anxious to get 
 hem married. The " three Dukes who come a'riding," as the old song has it, are three 
 overs, attracted by the beauty of the governess and the imaginary dowries of her pupils, 
 rhe path of love is very far from smooth, and many things happen before each of the 
 [iris finds her true vocation in life. 
 
 \ Specimen Spinster. By kate westlake yeigh. crown 
 
 8vo, cloth. 
 
 Shrewd, homely, kind-hearted and very human, Aunt Polly, the "Specimen Spinster," 
 tands out a life-like figure in these pages, and we feel impelled to weep with her over 
 er real troubles, and laugh with her over the humorous figure she is often forced to cut. 
 i'he incidents of her wooing by an elderly admirer, the parochial tea-party and her own 
 ;hristmas dinner, exhibit her in a quaintly comic light ; and a further piquancy and 
 harm is given to the tale by the lively niece who bursts upon her household 
 uiet, and the faithful maid-servant who glories in being the worst girl in the 
 eighbourhood. 
 
 II, PATERNOSTER BUILDINGS, LONDON, E.C 
 
T. FISHER UN WIN'S NEW NOVELS. 
 
 Grand Relations. By J. S. Fletcher, Author of "When 
 Charles the First was King," "The Arcadians," etc. Crown 8vo 
 cloth. [Red Clo7k Library.] 
 
 Mr. J. S. Fletcher's new novel "Grand Relations" is of the same gente as the same 
 author's well-kilo wn story "The Paths of the Prudent "—a comedy of rustic life. The 
 scenes are laid in a Yorkshire village, and the characters are all studies of real personalities. 
 An old Yorkshire farmer and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Jex, and their daughter, Victoria 
 Alberta ; Mrs. Jex's wealthy sister, Mrs. Lord ; Victoria's lover, George Gosling ; Gosling's 
 versatile friend, Rousby Parker, a smart young lawyer with a taste for practical jokes and 
 a talent for acting, are the principal dramatis persona, and there are several subordinate 
 characters of great interest. The dialogue of the story is very amusing and full of quaint 
 sayings ; there are several highly diverting situations, and the dinouement is startlingly 
 dramatic and full of genuine comedy. 
 
 Major W^eir. By K. L. Montgomery, Author of "The Cardinal's 
 Pawn." With 8 Illustrations. Crown Svo, cloth. [Red Cloth 
 Library.] 
 
 A NOVEL OF EDINBURGH IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY. 
 
 " It is a powerful book ; it is a witty book ; it is rich in style, full of humour, full of 
 hair-breadth escapes, pulsing with blood and Hie."— Academy. 
 
 "'Major Weir' must take its place among the very few great novels of Edinburgh." 
 —British Weekly. 
 
 " We do not remember to have read a novel in which fertility of invention was better 
 wedded with vigour of narrative."— Timrs. 
 
 " I do not know when I read a story that held me so breathless from start to finish as 
 • Major Weir '."—TrMfA. 
 
 The Flute of Pan* By John Oliver Hobbes. Crown 8vo, 
 cloth. [Red Cloth Library.] 
 
 The story of Mrs. Craigie's new novel is above all things a love story. The scenes are 
 laid in Venice, in Florence, and in the Princess Margaret's own kingdom of Siguria, which 
 may be taken as one of those kingdoms in Europe that keep more of the old romantic 
 Court life, with its intrigues, its dramatic surprises, its dangers and its pleasures, than is 
 possible in any of the capitals of the greater European nations. 
 
 II, PATERNOSTER BUILDINGS, LONDON, E.G. 
 
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