Page:The Best continental short stories of and the yearbook of the continental short story 1924-25.pdf/71

 seeking memories and traces of the years which had been buried deep, long centuries ago.

He loved this soil and these people, who were children of the ancient world perpetuated into modern times. Among these children of the past he found the scattering heritages of the long ago still surviving. He loved these strange regions and their primitive inhabitants so much that he felt as if he could live nowhere else in the world.

“I am sick at heart,” he said to his wife Edith. “I really suffer at being obliged to leave these places, full of joy and happiness, to return to countries of sadness and poverty, where life is only a wornout discipline and habitude, wholly automatic, where art is withering, where science, reduced to lifeless formulas, is drying up, and where, under the guise of policies and parties, everything has fallen to the ground. It all resembles a steady march toward the grave.”

But on repeated occasions Severus revisited the land of his joy and destiny. Edith accompanied him, though not on every journey. The two were united by the profound love of lovers and the profounder love of man and wife. Their love was unusually deep. “Whom could I possibly remember, if not yourself,” wrote Severus to her, “yourself, my tender comrade, my wife, always so extraordinarily anxious to sacrifice yourself, and always lighting for me, even when I must be separated from you, the road of my life. Ah, it is your smile of abnegation and your hopeful words which point the pilgrim’s pathway—that poor pilgrim who goes away again when he has scarcely come home! It is your dear smile which cheers my painful hours, and your sorrows are the greatest ones I ever know.”

The springtime of their love had passed, but their love remained ever the same, the great, changeless love of lovers and married people. Severus was making his last journey, which was his most famous one, and the one most fruitful in results. But this time he was not accompanied by his beloved Edith, as he set out on his quest for buried treasure.

Untold secrets are concealed within the language of old