The Abyss of Wonder by Perley Poore Sheehan

Author:Perley Poore Sheehan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-03-23T00:00:00+00:00

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CHAPTER XIX.

Ai-Yaruk, the Golden One.

THAT smell of wild-grape and locust-flowers was still with him as consciousness came struggling back. For a long time he lay there very still, his eyes closed. He was seeing nothing, hearing nothing. But that delicate, spring-time perfume was thrilling him as no voice had ever thrilled him. nor music, nor anything that he had ever seen with his eyes.

First of all, it was translating him to the back yard of his grandmother’s home, where he had dreamed and aspired; then it was carrying him back even farther, to days of courtship which, in this present life, most certainly he had not known at all.

Even unimaginative people are likely to be stirred by certain smells—the tang of wood-smoke, the perfume of certain flowers, the disquieting aroma of salt marshes on a foggy night.

Shan opened his eyes.

Once, when he was out in a little public park of Hambleton, he had seen a little girl playing mother to her baby brother sleeping in his perambulator. The little girl was leaning over the infant, looking down at it with such a look of transcendent love and holiness that he had never forgotten it.

As he opened his eyes he surprised a look like that in a pair of eyes just above his own—eyes that were golden-brown.

He looked up at them, afraid to look-away, as a slow tumult of fearful joy began to throb in his breast. He tried to speak. But no words came.

Golden, crinkly hair cascaded down about him—it was this that had filled the air with perfume. He had a general impression of light-gold skin, wonderfully smooth and lustrous, suffused now with a subtone of delicate shell-pink.

She had been leaning over him, bridging him with lithe, bare arms.

But suddenly she had straightened up.

He saw that her hair was circled by a finely wrought ribbon of gold wire. Her throat and shoulders, like her face, were bare, smooth, lustrous and beautiful. She seemed to be wearing but a single garment, a close-fitting sheath of what looked like yellow silk, held in place by a yellow ceinture, or girdle, which fitted her high up under her armpits and above her breast.

She was all grace and strength.

“Oh!” exclaimed Shan with a rising inflection. “Oh!”

He tried to rise, but he suddenly discovered that all strength had gone out of him, and it didn’t need the touch of even one of the girl’s hands on his shoulder to restrain him.

“What happened to me?” he asked.

The girl spoke to him softly and rapidly in a strange language; then, seeing that he could not understand, she translated for him with swift, graceful gestures which he could have watched forever, so he told himself.

She intimated that he had drunk of wicked waters that had mounted to his head and made him fall down, and then that some one—who could it have been but she?—had found him, had brought him here, had given him something to make him well again.

She showed him a small bottle that might have been cut from a single topaz.

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