Dolores

Dolores By Alfred Lambourne

I Why write her name? That name by which men knew her shall be unrecorded here. Instead, we will give her the name of sorrow. Indeed, sorrow she both gave and bore. She was one apart; a strange creature, there was none other like her, none. She was a type of her own; slender, fragile, a thing of grace, a being with whom no comparison may be made. Analytic description would not place her image before one. Of wondrous daintiness her hands, her feet, each limb. The clear pallor of her face was untouched by the faintest glow, her cheeks were wan as her brow, and yet her lips burned red. And red was her hair, a strange and sensuous red, that shaded into night. And it clung to her brow and temples as if it were ever moist with a clammy dew. And the exquisite ears, the column of the perfectly moulded nose, the quiver of the sensitive nostrils, we must speak of these. Ah, yes! And of her languid and weary smile, that parted the thin lips to disclose the small and perfect teeth. Yes, and of her haunting eyes, within whose darkness burned that light which seemed not of this earth. She was an intermedium, a something between day and night, between life and death, this world and another. Dolores was a sexton's daughter, and her life began in a City of the Dead. She breathed the fragrance of roses that grew by grassy mounds and half-sunken gravestones. With eyelids closed, she pressed the red petals to her redder lips, and her pleasure was none the less that their life might be fed in the dust of crumbled hearts. Yet in her ecstasy she shivered a little, for her blood, like the sap which crept upward from the roots in the sacred soil, flowed chill. Death was in her veins as it was in those of the plants. And soon the rose would droop and die, and her heart, too, would cease to beat. And then no more the beauty and fragrance of life. Yet this strange being was loved. This fragile woman, in whom was combined a psychical Astarte, with a terrestrial Nox, had lovers. The two young Teutons, Karl and Max, both sought her hand. The gardener, he whose days were passed among the florescent life; the grave-digger, he who dug in the earth, and prepared for the dead their tenements of clay; these men, twin brothers, loved blindly the sexton's daughter. And both

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the brothers were poor, yet both possessed a will. Despite their calling, the one might have been a disguised young god, and in the other could be seen a Dionysius. Tacitus, the Roman historian, long since has told us of the tenacity of will, the determination, of the early Teutonic race. Karl and Max? Each was conquered by passion, but each had vowed in secret to conquer in his turn. Each had, unalterably, set his heart upon possessing the sexton's daughter.

Fate brought them there. There was nothing incongruous in her act, from her days of childhood the City of the Dead had been her playground. She had spelled out her lessons in the letters on mossed and ivied tombs; in the years gone by, in the narrow stream, whose transparent waters crept from avenue to avenue of the sacred place, a hundred times, she had waded thus. This woman was a child in impulse — and now? The little foot was severely cut; she had stepped on a sharp-edged stone. The blood flowed swiftly, it made crimson the snowwhite skin, and, supine, helpless in pain, fainting, she leaned to the bole of a tree which grew on the stream's low bank. Yes, Fate brought them there. Together the men, these twin brothers, who each returned from his day's toil, bound up the wound. Then, with their hands clasped around each other's wrists, and, as if she were taking her part in a game of Queen's chair, was seated Dolores. Along the now darkening and deserted avenues, the white stones gleaming on either side, the men carried the one whom they loved. And, so, they reached the sexton'r< house, and passed through its gate.

II Deep in a gorge—inhospitable, bleak, as desolate and savage as the most misanthropic mind could conceive—Fate had placed two men. They were Karl and Max. The brothers, the two men who had learned to love the one woman, had met again in desperate game. They loved the same woman, and now they were alike seekers of gold. Flat-topped and stable, a long perspective of vast, rocky walls; wearisome to the eye with endless repetitions of masonry-like forms, huge blocks and tiers of basalt, ledge below ledge, slope below slope, gloomy ampitheatre, broken hallways, descending to the edge of a swirling river! We tell not where we have not named that being in the City of ;

the Dead, nor have we told where that Necropolis is, and the where of this place shall be unknown, and it shall be nameless, too. Terrible, this gorge, a place sinister as forbidding, one that might bring into life and foster black thoughts of evil, or harden a heart into sameness with its own harsh scenes, that might subdue a conscience, and fill with selfishness and savage desire a

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human soul. Terrible when the sun looked down upon it; and appalling beneath the storm; a scene of repellent desolation by day, and of sombre suggestions at night. — — And who were the inhabitants the human of this dreadful gorge? Had one looked over its edge, they would have beheld, far down, this unusual sight. A — rod of mesquite with a bit of bright rag fluttering atop —set in a crevice and piled around with stones. This was a "guide" and marked the head of a hazardous trail, but there, where the trail ended at the water's edge, along the sand-bars, were the seekers of wealth. There — they endured unkempt and grizzled, rough as the place in — which they toiled a thousand hardships. Half blinded with the glare of the sun upon the sands, yet chilled with the waters which brought the sands they sifted, tempting deaths from day to day, the men were ever toiling. There they endured all for the sake of the coveted gold. And among them Karl and Max, who fulfilled there the primal curse.

— "Thou shalt not covet" there is the law. But was that gorge a place of law? What law was there but the unbridled laws of nature, the law which would bid greed to take? Gold, — gold that he might win the sexton's daughter that was the greed in the soul of each. It was love which had taken those .

two men, Karl and Max, to toil on the river bars; it was love that had turned them into seekers of gold, but love in that place might be hardened by hate, made desperate with fear. Gold, on those river sands was to be gathered for the very taking, and the gold, day after day, in gleaming dust and weight of nuggets, increased the brothers' store. Sifting, sifting, that was their end-

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less toil; day after day, always at the water's edge; and with gleaming eyes and hands a-tremble with insatiate greed, the gold was won from the flood. To those brothers, who had nestled together in pre-natal life, the unconquerable, the perverted love for a woman, the fear of jealous rage, had brought this end. They toiled and hated, hated and toiled, and darkened their souls for the gleam of gold. Desperate chances, desperate need, and desperate men! Is it true that each soul contains the making of an angel, a demon? If so, then that cherished greed had done its work. In that terrible gorge the dread seeds in the soul of each brother had been developed into maleficent life. Had it not been for gold in that desolate place, may not that seed have remained dormant in each brother's soul? In that gorge the bleached or lichened bones of unknown victims have been found. How came they there? Perhaps the bones were of men who had met death alone, or were murdered by a false companion. After years have passed away, their stores of wealth have remained yet hidden, or they have been discovered and taken from the "cache." And, sometimes, the gathered gold was gone, for it was that which had proved the men's undoing. Karl and Max possessed wills of steel, and at — the center of each will was the sexton's daughter. In their desires, their determination, the men had grown fierce, in keeping with the savageness of the desolate gorge.

"Thou shalt not kill." Was there already guilt in those desperate hearts? Did each of those men desire the other's death? Each one hated the other's life. Had either of the lovers been struck dead by the fervid heat or by the lightning bolt, then the other would have looked with pleasure upon his brother's corpse. Or had the waters of the river swept one away, then the other would have exulted that he lived alone. They were near to the sin of Cain. Their loves, their hatreds, were hidden in their breasts, the name of Dolores was never spoken. Yet, all too well, each knew why the other was there. What but some dreadful purpose was in those furtive glances, that silent rage? Did they not plot as, at the river's edge, they vied in labor, when in their "shelter" they appraised their ruddy gains? Each would have taken away the other's store; no, not for the love of the gold alone, but in full knowledge of what some day, that gold might do. Death! Should this thing come to pass? Each man knew that the other's gold would be made an offering of love.

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And, at last, came the deeper crime, the act which broke the command, "Thou shalt not kill." And then the one lover lay dead, and the other seemed to hear the words: "Thy brother's blood crieth unto me from the ground."

Ill

The "shelter" was hidden in a great cleft, an antique and solemn hallway, riven at right angles, during some convulsion of nature, to the black gorge, and midway between the level top of the mountain wall, and the rushing stream. There had been enacted the unthinkable crime. And there one brother had suddenly realized the work he had done; and as suddenly, too, he seemed to age. Those moments were hours, those hours were years. How long ago it seemed that his brother had lived! And then it seemed to the murderer that the dead man spoke in the winds that came from the waste, in the voice of the river which came from below. Terrible the brightness, more terrible the night! Afar, a coyote howled, and the white mists which arose from the sunken waters, seemed but to hide some form of dread. "And they shall call for the mountains to fall on them, and the rocks to cover them." How suddenly in his heart was that man accursed, how suddenly an impossible place for that man, with his murder-accusing conscience, his terror-haunted soul, to dwell. And so the fratricide, the slayer of his twin-brother, had fled.

As it had been dashed to the ground the body lay. What need to tell which one? No matter which brother had slain his brother, the crime had been the same. Upon the dead man's throat there were the marks of finger grips; hate against hate, a sudden determination to conquer, there had been a fierce struggle amid the rocks. The footprints and the torn clothing bore witness to how desperate had been the contest. And one brother had conquered and the other lay dead. Each "cache" was undisturbed; to this day there the gold lies still. Of what avail the weighty nuggets, the gleaming dust? The sudden fear, the realization of the deed, the agony of remorse, had come. The living wished that he might change place with the dead. An inferno, that gorge, the scene of their toil, their jealousy, their — hate his crime. But where would it not be, for him, an inferno? The sight of the dead brother blasted his life. What — difference where he fled like the first of the race to murder, terrorized, with hands stained with his brother's blood? And banished forever from his love.

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Strive as he will against the thought, the murderer is drawn back to the scene of his crime. And as surely will the lover, hopeless in his hopeless passion long to look once more on the object of his love. Drawn there against his will, and yet of his own fascination, can we imagine a haggard and fear-stricken man, again in that cleft in the lava walls, and looking upon the yet undiscovered bones of a murdered brother? Or can we imagine that he then covered those bones from the sight of men, and lingered in that accursed spot? Yet both, the living brother did. And, even as the fratricide labored to hide away the evidence of his awful guilt, the shade, the ghost of the murdered man seemed to look upon him. Nor was this all, Delores, she whom the murderer believed to be yet among the living, yes, Dolores, she, also, appeared to be there at the scene of the crime and to gaze upon him at his labor with calm, yet, unearthly eyes. Dolores, or the spirit of Dolores, and again the living brother fled from that terrible gorge. Whowas that who later crept in his guilt into the City of the Dead? Dolores! As one who is dying of thirst longs to place to his parched lips the cooling waters, so that man, in his agony, longed to drink at the fount of love. Dolores I Once more, before he sank into the depths, he would look on that slender form, the hands, the feet, the pallid face, the sensuous hair, the smile, the red lips of the sexton's daughter. He would read his fate, in her living, her haunting eyes. But he looked not again on these. The twilight lay around; it had been thus in the City of the Dead, in that hour when, with his brother, he had helped to carry his wounded love, as in a Queen's Chair. But oh! what now met his startled sight! That newly made grave? Ah, God! "Dolores." There, then, was his love! Clay that mingled with clay. Upon that grassy sward she had played when a child; near the mossy head stones upon which she had once spelled the letters, the stream flowed by. Down that avenue Dolores had walked when she had become a woman, and along its length the brothers had borne her, when her strange beauty had set their hearts on fire. There was her grave, and the fragrance of the roses was all around.

The supernatural is not of death, it is of life. Those accusing eyes which had looked upon the murderer in the desert gorge did not belong to that woman who lay dead, but to the spirit which did not cease to live. They belonged not to the dust of that frail and beautiful body, but to the intensity in that parted soul.