Page:Weird Tales Volume 4 Number 2 (1924-05-07).djvu/43

THE next day St. Cloud was borne to his sepulcher—rock-hewn, in that mountain range whence we had first seen Conderogan. Shortly afterward, however, the desecrating body of our unfortunate companion (at the instigation of Sallysherib) was taken from its vault, and the place of his sepulcher is now unknown—probably, I have always thought, the blue waters of the Uava.

The great sun was setting when Henry and I stepped ashore at Conderogan, flooding sky, earth and water with a beauty that Turner himself never even dreamed.

At length (darkness had now fallen) we issued from our chambers and directed our steps toward that apartment into which Draconda had conducted us on our arrival—and from which we had gone to witness that awful meeting with St. Cloud.

As we drew near, we heard Draconda singing, accompanying her song on a guitar-like instrument. The words were in Greek, their burden:

We paused, waited till the last golden note had died away. As we moved forward, came the clang of steel as the guards grounded their weapons, and a word or two to announce our coming. Each guard stretched forth a hand, grasped his curtain and draw it, and in a moment we were in the queen's presence.

The princess was there, and old Mayto.

Draconda's eyes lingered on her lover.

"You are fatigued, my Henry," she observed, with some solicitude. "I said you ought not go."

"'Tis nothing, Draconda," he returned. "And this remains: no matter what his evil, yet Morgan was our companion in hours, in days, in an adventure never to be forgotten; and memory and comradeship called me to his tomb."

The queen was silent for a space. She had laid aside her guitar. Her chin was resting on her palm, her brows slightly drawn together, and her eyes fixed on Henry Quainfan's face in a look of curious intensity.

"Let the dead past bury its dead," said Draconda.

A little silence.

"It seems," Henry returned, somewhat irrelevantly I thought at first, "that Poe had a legion of Truth marching under his awful banner:

The dark eyes of Draconda seemed to smile mournfully—and yet, strangely enough, they seemed to remain unchanged.

"Yet he had another banner," she said, "one radiant, iridescent, ineffable. How do you explain the legion marching under his banner of Love? that sweetest, perhaps, of all love poems?—

"What's the explanation, my Henry? Dreams—only dreams? And those rainbow glimpses of things cosmic and spiritual in The Power of Words and The Colloquy of Monos and Una? The explanation, my Henry? Only dreams?"

"That was my explanation, Draconda."

"And now?"

"Now I do not know," he said.

She smiled wanly, with a curious spiritual sadness.

"'Twas thus you explained your picture of me," she said, "and alas, I my soul vision of you—even I, who should have known!"

He looked at her inquiringly.

"How so, Draconda?"

There was a swift change: she suddenly drew herself erect, the thought shadows vanishing from her eyes and features.

"'Come!'" she said in a thrilling voice, "'we will leave to the left the loud harmony of the Pleiades, and swoop outward from the throne into the starry meadows beyond Orion, where, for pansies and violets, and heart's-ease, are the beds of the triplicate and triple-tinted suns.'"

"I follow," said Henry Quainfan.

Her lips severed for speech, then suddenly broke into one of her wondrous smiles as she sent a roguish glance in my direction, a glance that seemed to say:

"Now, my Farnermain, you get yours!"

At any rate, I did!

Explain? Draconda did explain. At the beginning, I felt confident, in spite of her air of certitude, that she could neither undo nor cut this Gordian knot which her tongue had tied. But she did. And her anacalypsis brought a sharp realization of the curious impedimenta under which our flesh-enshrouded spirits march along toward the terrible-wondrous Gates of Destiny.

Science, who has destroyed so many of our cherished superstitions (and, I fear, some things that were not superstitions) would destroy, too, the belief in anything supernatural; and thus, under the influence of her materialistic teaching (more or less unconsciously, that is) we often pronounce the inexplicable an hallucination or a hocus-pocus—and think we have delivered a crushing refutation.