The Infant's Skull Or The End of the World. A Tale of the Millennium

Excerpt

THE FOUNTAIN OF THE HINDS.

A spring of living water, known in the neighborhood by the appropriate name of the "Fountain of the Hinds," empties its trickling stream under the oaks of one of the most secret recesses of the forest of Compiegne. Stags and hinds, deers and does, bucks and she-goats come to water at the spot, leaving behind them numerous imprints of their steps on the borders of the rill, or on the sandy soil of the narrow paths that these wild animals have worn across the copse.

One early morning in the year 987, the sun being up barely an hour, a woman, plainly dressed and breathing hard with rapid walking, stepped out of one of these paths and stopped at the Fountain of the Hinds. She looked in all directions in surprise as if she expected to have been preceded by some one at the solitary rendezvous. Finding her hopes deceived, she made an impatient motion, sat down, still out of breath, on a rock near the fountain, and threw off her cape.

The woman, barely twenty years of age, had black hair, eyes and eye-brows; her complexion was brown; and cherry-red her lips. Her features were handsome, while the mobility of her inflated nostrils and the quickness of her motions betokened a violent nature. She had rested only a little while when she rose again and walked up and down with hurried steps, stopping every now and then to listen for approaching footsteps. Catching at last the sounds of a distant footfall, she thrilled with joy and ran to the encounter of him she had been expecting. He appeared. It was a man, also in plain garb and in the vigor of age, large-sized and robust, with a piercing eye and somber, wily countenance. The young woman leaped at a bound into the arms of this personage, and passionately addressed him: "Hugh, I meant to overwhelm you with reproaches; I meant to strike you; but here you are and I forget everything," and in a transport of amorous delight she added, suiting the deed to the words: "Your lips! Oh, give me your lips to kiss!"

After the exchange of a shower of kisses, and disengaging himself, not without some effort, from the embrace of the fascinated woman, Hugh said to her gravely: "We cannot indulge in love at this hour."

"At this hour, to-day, yesterday, to-morrow, everywhere and always, I love and shall continue to love you."

"Blanche, they are foolhardy people who use the word 'always,' when barely fourteen years separate us from the term assigned for the end of the world! This is a grave and a fearful matter!"

"What! Can you have given me this early morning appointment at this secreted place, whither I have come under pretext of visiting the hermitage of St. Eusebius, to talk to me about the end of the world? Hugh ... Hugh.... To me there is no end of the world but when your love ends!"

"Trifle not with sacred matters! Do you not know that in fourteen years, the first day of the year 1000, this world will cease to be and with it the people who inhabit it?"

Struck by the coldness of her lover's answers, Blanche brusquely stepped back....