by Jerry
Count Natali pressed my arm.
“How excited we all are; is it not so, carissima?” he said.
His soft clasp hardened to a grip of iron, and I gasped with the pain of it.
“Por Dio!” he whispered, and again, “Por Dio!”
Then for many seconds all our group was silent, and a quarter of a mile down the slope of Black Bear I heard plainly the splash and tinkle of Forge Run flinging itself endessly over a ten-foot fall.
For a great layer of the asbestos had come away in the workers’ hands, and disclosed the contents of the sarcophagus.
As a newly-fallen icicle might lie embedded in a bank of rain-soiled snow, a crystal casket lay glittering against the bed of dull-gray asbestos which surrounded it, and within the casket’s gleaming panels lay neither mummy nor man, but a woman with sun-gold hair.
Many authors have written that we of womankind are prone to see our sisters through cats’ eyes and to judge them with prejudice and jealousy. That may be true;
I won’t argue it. But I, another woman, shall think always of the being who lay in that scintillant crystal casket as the most beautiful thing that ever came to earth. So poignant was the beauty of her that mere memory of it hurts.
No language which has yet been written can make one see the perfections of her—perfections of every line and contour of face and figure—and I am not going to make myself ridiculous by attempting to put the burden upon my English.
But she was a blonde of a blondness which made poor Carrie’s type look dingy and scrubby by contrast. She lay easily upon a long cushion affair of soft, white material, which had been crinkled and padded around her until it fitted her as the satin of a jewel-case fits the brooch of pearls for which it was made.
It was difficult to believe that such a radiant thing could die; though I suppose that all of us who were staring into that crystal casket had no other thought than that she must be dead. The casket itself and all its trappings suggested death. But its inmate, by her easy posture, the bloom of her cheeks and the carmine of her lips, suggested slumber only.
Her costume’ is hardly worth mentioning. It was—well, what a fastidious woman might have chosen for a nap, and scant. Her hair flowed loose. She wore no jewels of any kind, not so much as a single finger-ring. But had she come to us bedizened with gems and arrayed like Balkis, she could never have impressed us as she did lying there in simple white in the white purity of her glittering crystal casket.
We stared, and were as still as she.
ODDLY enough, it was Mr. Conoway who first broke our startled silence. “Raymarkably well prayserved, isn’t she, sor?” he said to Rickey, and removed his hat.
Count Natali’s grip of my arm—the flesh bore blue fingermarks for days—relaxed, and with something very like an oath he caught up one of the blankets and threw it across the sarcophagus, hiding the casket from profaning eyes.
“Thank you, Joe,” acknowledged Rickey, shaking himself as though coming out of a dream. He had not heard Mr. Conoway’s first banality. The Irishman committed a second.
“B’eloike wan of us had betther be afther notifyin’ the coroner, sor,” he remarked solemnly, and put on his hat again.
“I will attend to it, Conoway,” answered Rickey, “depend upon it. Now, if I may impose upon you a bit more, I’ll have your gang here give us a lift with that casket, and we’ll take it over to the bungalow. We can sling it in the blankets over a couple of poles.”
All this while not a word from Aunt Caroline or Carrie. I stole a peep at them. Aunt was weeping softly into her handkerchief. Carrie was lost in thought.
Mr. Conoway’s laborers made a difficulty about complying with Rickey’s request. When it turned out that there was no treasure in the sarcophagus, they, after their first surprise, experienced a rapid loss of interest, replaced by a superstitious fear of its contents. They refused to touch the crystal case, until Count Natali, exerting an influence superior to Mr. Conoway’s threats, virtually compelled them to do it.
The count drove us slowly back to the bungalow. Behind us, Rickey followed, directing ten of the laborers, who, walking two and two, carried the casket.in a blanket sling.
“Poor thing’ Poor thing!” said Aunt Caroline, recovering speech. “I shall see her face to the day of my death. Don’t talk to me about her, please. I’m very much upset, really.”
We ate a subdued dinner, while the casket, swathed in blankets, lay upon the floor in Rickey’s hunting-room, which looks north. Out of deference to Aunt Caroline’s state of mind, we forbore reference to it during the meal.
Various as I suppose our views concerning it were, it exercised a fascination upon us all, and we were soon gathered around it again.
“I hope you will have her decently buried as soon as possible, Richard,” said aunt, as, after another long look at the unworldly beauty of the occupant of the crystal case, she turned away, shaking her head sadly.
“Buried!” he echoed. “Not until I am sure that she is really dead.”
Aunt’s jaw fell.
“Richard!” she ejaculated, “you’re not—you’re not going to—”
“I’m going to take the means necessary to be certain,” he replied firmly. He knelt down and began to inspect the casket.
Count Natali made a pretense of assisting him—a pretense, I say; for it was patent that he could not keep his eyes from the woman.
Aunt Caroline seated herself on a divan and gazed fixedly out the window, her toes keeping up a ceaseless tattoo on the floor.
Moved by I do not know’ what impulse, Carrie went to Rickey’s baby-grand in the corner, and began to strum mournfully in a slow minor key. I continued to stand by the head of the casket.
“Air tight, and perhaps soundproof.” said Rickey at the end of ten minutes. “Here’s some kind of a lever, which seems to—connect through to a sort of tank arrangement inside, and there’s apparently another lever inside here, near her shoulder. Shall I chance it, Joe?” He laid a hand on the outer lever.
The count nodded abstractedly, though I am sure that he had not sensed the question.
Rickey pressed the lever. His sleeve was turned back, and I saw the cords of his forearm bulge under the skin. The lever yielded noiselessly for an inch or more.
“There,” he said, “now let’s see what happens.”
Nothing apparently, not immediately. We waited for I suppose five minutes, though it seemed fifteen; Rickey squatted on his haunches, Count Natali kneeling, and I standing.
I cried out sharply. I was first to see it—the flutter of a pulse in the neck.
Before I could point out my discovery to the others, the woman’s bosom heaved softly, and at once a tide of rich color swept into her cheeks.
She was alive!
CHAPTER V
THE VISITOR FROM THE SKY
CARRIE and aunt had come at my cry.
We stared down at this miracle in silence, and with swirling senses. Then Rickey swore softly to himself, and I think we were all grateful to him, even aunt.
“She is not dead, but sleeping,” murmured Aunt Caroline.
“I’m going to waken her,” said Rickey with the handle of his pocket-knife he struck upon the side of the casket, near the woman’s head. The crystal rang like a bell under the blow. Aunt started violently.
“Richard! Stop that instantly!” she commanded. Really it did seem a fearful thing to do, but Rickey struck three times.
Mrs. Sanders, who could not have been far from the door, thrust her gray head through and asked if anything was wanted.
“You may bring tea, Sanders,” replied Aunt Caroline weakly. Mrs. Sanders cast a horrified glance at the casket and withdrew.
The crystal had not ceased to vibrate under Rickey’s last blow when the woman within stirred; a change of expression passed across her features, and she opened her eyes. They were black as night, when I had thought that they would have been blue.
For only an instant her face retained the be
wilderment of the newly-awakened; then the brain took command, and she looked up into Count Natali’s face and smiled. I heard him catch his breath with a gasp, and he bent nearer the casket. She seemed to see only him of all of us, and as if in response to his involuntary movement, her hands crept up until they came in contact with the crystal lid of her prison.
The feel of. it touched the spring of memory. She flashed a glance at the rest of us, and her wonderful eyes widened. Groping at her shoulder with one hand, she pressed the lever which Rickey had discovered there. It released hidden springs, or else there was a pressure of gas within the narrow chamber. The lid rose swiftly, discovering that it was hinged at one side, and fell over on the heap of blankets.
A puff of cool, choking atmosphere struck me in the face. I inhaled some of it, and it dizzied me. I reeled back and took hold of a chair for support.
The strange woman arose from her cushioned rest, and extending a hand to Count Natali for his aid, stepped out upon the floor.
One glimpse of her face I had before the catastrophe.
Asleep, she had been of supernal beauty; awake, her black eyes flashing, and her cheeks aglow, her face presented such a combination of intellect and passion as I have never seen or expect to see upon any other mortal countenance, fleshly or painted. Queenly is too weak an adjective to describe it, but it is the only one I can think of.
For an instant T saw her so, smiling as Count Natali bowed low before her. Then came a change, a terrible change. She had taken a step forward. Her mouth was open for speech, when I saw her glorious eyes go wide. She swayed, one hand clutching at her bosom, and the ripe color faded in her cheeks.
Whatever weakness had come upon her, I thought at the moment she had overcome. She moved on toward the north door with a regal carriage, still holding Natali’s hand, but she did not speak, and her face was like death.
At the doorway she paused and looked down the sunlighted slopes of Black Bear and up at the cloudless sky. A supreme triumph conquered the shadow of disaster in her face. Half turning, she let fall Count Natali’s fingers, raised her white arms above her head, and cried in a voice like a silver bell:
“Yee-mah! Yee-mah! Alla ferma na somme!”
It was her swan song. Before the echoes of the marvelous voice had ceased to thrill us, she had collapsed, choking, into the Italian’s arms.
We ran toward them and helped him to carry her to the divan, but all we could do was useless. In three minutes she was dead.
When that fact was sure we stood and stared stupidly. Natali hung over her, his face like that of a carven statue, the statue of a red Indian or a Bedouin sheik. From the instant when she had smiled into his eyes, for him, the rest of us had ceased to exist.
Our spell of sorrow and horror was broken by Mrs. Sanders, who bustled in with an armful of tea-things, sized up the situation, and fainted in a terrific clatter.
I recall hearing Carrie say, “I wish I could do that; I do really,” and then my nerves would stand no more. Instead of turning to and helping them resuscitate Mrs. Sanders, I escaped to my room, and for more than an hour did battle with a round of hysterics.
When I was once more presentable. I found that Aunt Caroline had retired with a headache—I suspect that it was another name for what had ailed me—and Carrie had gone out for a walk in the woods.
Rickey and Count Natali were in the hunting room, my cousin sitting dejectedly upon the divan, and the count standing at the north doorway and looking down the mountainside. The crystal casket had again received its burden, and the blankets were over it.
“Well, I suppose there is only one thing to be done, Joe,” I heard Rickey say as I came down the stairs, “and that is to do as the Irishman said, and call in the coroner. Then we will bury her.”
“No; I beg of you to let me dispose of those arrangements,” interposed the count earnestly, without turning from his stand. “I know that you will not gainsay me, my friend. I will go down at once to the station. I have messages to dispatch.” He stepped out without seeing me, and a couple of minutes later we heard him leaving in one of Rickey’s cars.
Rickey caught sight of me and jumped up. I suppose that I must have looked woebegone, for he shook his head over me, and then managed to grin.
“I say, Ruth, old girl, let’s you and I go out and walk it off,” he proposed.
At the edge of the clearing we met Carrie coming in. Her eye-lids were swollen.
RICKEY explained to me what he thought had happened. It was our air which had killed the strange visitor. The atmosphere of earth must be of a different quality from that at Mars.
“But I don’t see how we could have helped it,” he said. “She attempted a splendid thing, and failed. I feel like crying like a baby every time I think of the sheer pluck of her.”
I did, too. It was as if a goddess had died, as Carrie said afterward.
I saw the sky woman only once more. It was in’ the night, that same night. I could sleep only in nervous cat-naps, and when I did I dreamed such fantasies that it was a relief to wake from them. Finally I gave it up, and put on a dressing-gown and sat at the window. There was a white moon and a silence, and I thought and thought.
At first my musings were disjointed and silly, evidenced by the persistent running through my mind of two lines of a rather vulgar old college ditty:
Sing ho for the great Semiramis!
Her like we shall ne’er see again—
which came to me, as such things sometimes will insist in our human brains upon intruding themselves among the sacrosanct and the sublime.
Truth to tell, contemplation of. the events of the day gave me a touch of vertigo. The stupendous hardihood and daring of the sky woman overawed me. She could not have known that she would find human beings to release her, nor had she means to release herself; yet she had taken the thousandth chance, and had herself flung out through the space toward our world, gambling her life with magnificent recklessness.
Had she missed her mark, she might have fallen through infinity and eternity; perhaps been sucked into the vortex of some blazing sun, to perish like a moth in a candle-flame. All these things she had weighed, and still her splendid spirit had been undaunted.
Surely this was the supreme test of mortal courage, confidence and fortitude; or it was fatalism to its with power. To die is less than she had offered. She had made the cast, and failed; and before the sheer splendor of her failure the most glorious human achievements that I could think of were dimmed. Columbus launching himself westward across unknown waters in his leaky caravels, was a puny comparison.
And no glory had offered, not as we rate glory; she could not have returned to tell her people that she had succeeded.
An impulse grew strong upon me to go down to the hunting-room. I fought it, for I was afraid; but it conquered, and I stole down the stairs to take another look at the wondrous stranger. How glad I have always been that I did so!
The blankets had been thrown back from the crystal case, and the moonlight shone in through a window and gleamed and glittered frostily upon it’s translucent fabric and upon the beauty, now pallid and awful, of its occupant.
I paused upon the rug without the doorway; for the sky woman was not alone.
At the head of the casket sat, or rather crouched, Count Natali. His face was toward me, but he did not see me; his eyes were upon the dead. One by one, great, slow tears were trickling down his cheeks.
As I stood there, almost afraid to breathe, Rickey stepped in through the outer door. He too had been moved to night-wandering from his bed it seemed, for he was in his bathrobe. He saw Count Natali, and went to him and laid a hand upon his shoulder.
“Come, Joe, old man, best go to bed,” he said.
“I cannot, my friend,” Natali answered. “I must watch. Something has come to me that is tearing my heart to shreds. How shall I say it? I—” His voice broke, and he pointed to the casket and covered his face.
“I think that I can understand, Jo
e,” said Rickey very gently. “I am sorry.”
I crept back upstairs and to bed. I too understood. I suppose that I ought to have felt jealous and horrid, but I didn’t. I just felt very small and insignificant and lost.
Poor sky woman! Living or dead, I would not have fought you. Anyway, I couldn’t have competed with a princess of the blood royal of Mars—and she must have been all of that.
In the morning Rickey took me for another walk in the woods.
“Joe has asked me to tell you something, little one,” he began, facing me squarely, but speaking in a I’d-rather-be-hung-than-do-it manner.
“Then you needn’t,” I interrupted, “for I know what it is. I was at the door of the hunting-room last night, and I couldn’t help overhearing part of it. And you needn’t be compassionate, Rickey Moyer, for somehow I can’t seem to cate as perhaps I should—and I’m glad—”
Maybe I leaned just the least bit toward him, he looked so big and strong and leanable. Anyway, his hand crept under my chin. I don’t know what he saw in my tilted face; but next instant I was crying against his breast-pocket, and he was holding me comfortingly tight in his great arms and telling me that he had cared for me since we were small, “only somehow Joe seemed to have beat me to it.”
So, you see, I have found compensation for what the sky woman cost me. Rickey and I are to be married soon.
And the sky woman? Count Natali had her embalmed in some marvelous Italian fashion and took her back to Italy with him. I often have a vision of him sitting in a moonlighted hall of his old Udolpho castle with his dead but imperishable bride, while the slow tears glisten upon his cheeks and fall upon her crystal casket.
