The Gilded Man: A Romance of the AndesSmyth, Clifford
Science
The Gilded Man: A Romance of the Andes
Smyth, Clifford
Andes Region -- Fiction; El Dorado -- Fiction; Science fiction
"Years ago. We were happy. I loved him. It was not as the women of your
world love. Life was less than his least wish. And he loved me. Plans
for the great rejoicing--the Feast of the Gilded Man--were made. Not
since the Spaniards came--perhaps never before--has there been such
preparation. Then, a change came over him. He talked of an outside
world he had seen in his dreams. He was bewitched then, as he is now.
He had forgotten you, his false friend, and all the life he had lived
before. To cure him, I sent him out with some of our people. He scarcely
understood, but he accepted anything I did as if it came from his own
will. Then he disappeared. Without a word he left me. There came long
years of uncertainty. The few months he passed with me here seemed like
some bright dream that vanishes. I began to think it was a dream--when
suddenly I heard of him again. Some of my people found him wandering
aimlessly in the forest near the Bogota road. He was looking for me, he
said--he had forgotten the rest of the world."
There was an artless simplicity in Sajipona's confession of her love
and disappointment that was more than eloquence. Narva stood apart, her
face shrouded in her mantle, motionless, as if the remembrance of these
bygone matters carried with it something of a religious experience. Upon
Una the effect was startlingly different. She listened in amazement,
indignation, at this revelation of a passion in which her lover had
shared--of which she had known nothing--and that seemed to place
him utterly apart from her. If Sajipona's tale was true--the manner
of its telling, her own engaging personality, carried irresistible
conviction--David's love for Una had been shadowed all along by an
earlier, deeper sentiment that gave it the color of something that was
not altogether real. Why had he never told her of this Indian romance?
Hypnotism indeed! What man could help kneeling in passionate adoration
before this queenly woman, whose beauty was of that glorious warmth
and fragrance belonging to the purple and scarlet flowers of one's
dreams, whose love combined the unreasoning devotion of a child with
the proud loyalty that inspires martyrdom? They had loved--David and
Sajipona--there could be no doubt of that. Before he met Una on the
shores of that far-off English lake, David had stood soul to soul in a
heaven created by this radiant being. He was with her again. The past
was completely blotted out; the tender idyl of Derwentwater, of Rysdale,
forgotten. Even the sight of Una herself stirred but the vaguest ripple
of memory. There was mystery, certainly, in these strange moods of
forgetfulness from which David was suffering. Her uncle could give them
a learned name and account for them as belonging to something quite
outside the man's will, outside his control. But what did Leighton
really know of all this? Such matters were beyond the reach of the mere
scientist. With a flash of scorn she doubted Leighton's knowledge; his
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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