You rowed across the moon-path white,
And saw the shining sea grow fair
With silver scales and golden hair--
What would you do?
"What would you do?" I repeated dreamily, thinking very likely as I said
them, of two eyes of mysteriously enfolding fire; and then, as if the
fairy night were matching the words with a challenge, what was this
bright wonder suddenly present on one of the boulders far down beneath
me?--a tall shape of witchcraft whiteness, standing, full in the moon,
like a statue in luminous marble of some goddess of antiquity. Only once
before, and but for a moment, had I seen a woman's form so proudly
flowerlike in its superb erectness!
My eyes and my heart together told me it was she; and, as she hung
poised over the edge of the water, in the attitude of one about to dive,
a turn of her head gave me that longed-for glimpse of those living eyes
filled with moonlight. She stood another moment, still as the night, in
her loveliness; and the next, she had dived directly into the path of
the moon. I saw her eyes moon-filled again, as she came to the surface,
and began to swim--not, as one might have expected, out from the land,
but directly in toward the unseen base of the cliffs. The moon-path
_did_ lead to a golden door in the rocks, I said to myself, and she was
about to enter it. It was a secret door known only to herself; and then,
for the first time that night, I thought of that doubloon.
Perhaps if I had not thought of it, I should not have done what then I
did. There will, doubtless, be those who will censure me. If so, I am
afraid they must. At all events, it was the thought of that doubloon
that swayed the balance of my hesitation in taking the moon-path in the
track of that bright apparition. The pursuit of my hidden treasure had
long been so fixed an idea in my mind that a scruple would have had to
be strong indeed to withstand my impulse to follow up so exciting a
clue. (When, alas! has the pursuit of gold heeded any scruples?) Or it
is quite possible that a radically different inclination held this
materialistic excuse as a cloak for itself. A moment of such glamorous
excitement may well account for some confused psychology.
I leave it to others who, less fortunate than I, were not exposed to the
breathless enchantments of that immortal night, those sorceries of a
situation lovely as the wildest dreams of the heart. I looked about for
a way down to the edge of the sea. It w
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