第53章 ALICIA'S DIARY(28)

Sometimes he falls on his knees,burrowing with his hands in the manner of a hare,and where his old-fashioned broadcloth touches the sides of the hole it gets plastered with the damp earth.He continually murmurs to himself how important,how very important,this discovery is!He draws out an object;we wash it in the same primitive way by rubbing it with the wet grass,and it proves to be a semi-transparent bottle of iridescent beauty,the sight of which draws groans of luxurious sensibility from the digger.Further and further search brings out a piece of a weapon.It is strange indeed that by merely peeling off a wrapper of modern accumulations we have lowered ourselves into an ancient world.Finally a skeleton is uncovered,fairly perfect.He lays it out on the grass,bone to its bone.

My friend says the man must have fallen fighting here,as this is no place of burial.He turns again to the trench,scrapes,feels,till from a corner he draws out a heavy lump--a small image four or five inches high.We clean it as before.It is a statuette,apparently of gold,or,more probably,of bronze-gilt--a figure of Mercury,obviously,its head being surmounted with the petasus or winged hat,the usual accessory of that deity.Further inspection reveals the workmanship to be of good finish and detail,and,preserved by the limy earth,to be as fresh in every line as on the day it left the hands of its artificer.

We seem to be standing in the Roman Forum and not on a hill in Wessex.Intent upon this truly valuable relic of the old empire of which even this remote spot was a component part,we do not notice what is going on in the present world till reminded of it by the sudden renewal of the storm.Looking up I perceive that the wide extinguisher of cloud has again settled down upon the fortress-town,as if resting upon the edge of the inner rampart,and shutting out the moon.I turn my back to the tempest,still directing the light across the hole.My companion digs on unconcernedly;he is living two thousand years ago,and despises things of the moment as dreams.

But at last he is fairly beaten,and standing up beside me looks round on what he has done.The rays of the lantern pass over the trench to the tall skeleton stretched upon the grass on the other side.The beating rain has washed the bones clean and smooth,and the forehead,cheek-bones,and two-and-thirty teeth of the skull glisten in the candle-shine as they lie.

This storm,like the first,is of the nature of a squall,and it ends as abruptly as the other.We dig no further.My friend says that it is enough--he has proved his point.He turns to replace the bones in the trench and covers them.But they fall to pieces under his touch:

the air has disintegrated them,and he can only sweep in the fragments.The next act of his plan is more than difficult,but is carried out.The treasures are inhumed again in their respective holes:they are not ours.Each deposition seems to cost him a twinge;and at one moment I fancied I saw him slip his hand into his coat pocket.

'We must re-bury them ALL,'say I.

'O yes,'he answers with integrity.'I was wiping my hand.'

The beauties of the tesselated floor of the governor's house are once again consigned to darkness;the trench is filled up;the sod laid smoothly down;he wipes the perspiration from his forehead with the same handkerchief he had used to mop the skeleton and tesserae clean;and we make for the eastern gate of the fortress.

Dawn bursts upon us suddenly as we reach the opening.It comes by the lifting and thinning of the clouds that way till we are bathed in a pink light.The direction of his homeward journey is not the same as mine,and we part under the outer slope.

Walking along quickly to restore warmth I muse upon my eccentric friend,and cannot help asking myself this question:Did he really replace the gilded image of the god Mercurius with the rest of the treasures?He seemed to do so;and yet I could not testify to the fact.Probably,however,he was as good as his word.

It was thus I spoke to myself,and so the adventure ended.But one thing remains to be told,and that is concerned with seven years after.Among the effects of my friend,at that time just deceased,was found,carefully preserved,a gilt statuette representing Mercury,labelled 'Debased Roman.'No record was attached to explain how it came into his possession.The figure was bequeathed to the Casterbridge Museum.

Detroit Post,March 1885.

WHAT THE SHEPHERD SAW:A TALE OF FOUR MOONLIGHT NIGHTSThe genial Justice of the Peace--now,alas,no more--who made himself responsible for the facts of this story,used to begin in the good old-fashioned way with a bright moonlight night and a mysterious figure,an excellent stroke for an opening,even to this day,if well followed up.

The Christmas moon (he would say)was showing her cold face to the upland,the upland reflecting the radiance in frost-sparkles so minute as only to be discernible by an eye near at hand.This eye,he said,was the eye of a shepherd lad,young for his occupation,who stood within a wheeled hut of the kind commonly in use among sheep-keepers during the early lambing season,and was abstractedly looking through the loophole at the scene without.