Beyond The Great Oblivion | Page 3

and trust and mutual understanding, they reached
the somewhat open space before the bungalow, where once the road had ended in a
stone-paved drive. Allan's wounded arm, had he but sensed it, was beginning to pain
more than a little. But he was oblivious. His love, the fire of spring that burned in his
blood, the lure of this great adventuring, banished all consciousness of ill.
Parting a thicket, they reached the steps. And for a while they stood there, hand in hand,
silent and thrilled with vast, strange thoughts, dreaming of what must be. In their eyes lay
mirrored the future of the human race. The light that glowed in them evoked the glories
of the dawn of life again, after ten centuries of black oblivion.
"Our home now!" he told her, very gently, and again he kissed her, but this time on the
forehead. "Ours when we shall have reclaimed it and made it ours. See the yellow roses,
dear? They symbolize our golden future. The red, red roses? Our passion and our pain!"
The girl made no answer, but tears gathered in her eyes--tears from the deepest wells of
the soul. She brought his hand to her lips.
"Ours!" she whispered tremblingly.
They stood there together for a little space, silent and glad. From an oak that shaded the
porch a squirrel chippered at them. A sparrow--larger now than the sparrows they
remembered in the time that was--peered out at them, wondering but unafraid, from its
nest under the eaves; at them, the first humans it had ever seen.
"We've got a tenant already, haven't we?" smiled Allan. "Well, I guess we sha'n't have to
disturb her, unless perhaps for a while, when I cut away this poison ivy here." He pointed
at the glossy triple leaf. "No poisonous thing, whether plant, snake, spider, or insect, is
going to stay in this Eden!" he concluded, with a laugh.

Together, with a strange sense of violating the spirit of the past, they went up the concrete
steps, untrodden now by human feet for ten centuries.
The massive blocks were still intact for the most part, for old Van Amburg had builded
with endless care and with no remotest regard for cost. Here a vine, there a sapling had
managed to insinuate a tap-root in some crack made by the frost, but the damage was
trifling. Except for the falling of a part of a cornice, the building was complete. But it was
hidden in vines and mold. Moss, lichens and weeds grew on the steps, flourishing in the
detritus that had accumulated.
Allan dug the toe of his sandal into the loose drift of dead leaves and pine-spills that
littered the broad piazza.
"It'll need more than a vacuum cleaner to put this in shape!" said he. "Well, the sooner we
get at it, the better. We'd do well to take a look at the inside."
The front door, one-time built of oaken planks studded with hand-worked nails and
banded with huge wrought-iron hinges, now hung there a mere shell of itself, worm-eaten,
crumbling, disintegrated.
With no tools but his naked hands Stern tore and battered it away. A thick, pungent haze
of dust arose, yellow in the morning sunlight that presently, for the first time in a
thousand years, fell warm and bright across the cob-webbed front hallway, through the
aperture.
Room by room Allan and Beatrice explored. The bungalow was practically stripped bare
by time.
"Only moth and rust," sighed the girl. "The same story everywhere we go. But--well,
never mind. We'll soon have it looking homelike. Make me a broom, dear, and I'll sweep
out the worst of it at once."
Talking now in terms of practical detail, with romance for the hour displaced by harsh
reality, they examined the entire house.
Of the once magnificent furnishings, only dust-piles, splinters and punky rubbish
remained. Through the rotted plank shutters, that hung drunkenly awry from rust-eaten
hinges, long spears of sunlight wanly illuminated the wreck of all that had once been the
lavish home of a billionaire.
Rugs, paintings, furniture, bibelots, treasures of all kinds now lay commingled in
mournful decay. In what had evidently been the music room, overlooking the grounds to
southward, the grand piano now was only a mass of rusted frame, twisted and broken
fragments of wire and a considerable heap of wood-detritus, with a couple of corroded
pedals buried in the pile.
"And this was the famous hundred-thousand-dollar harp of Sara, his daughter, that the
papers used to talk so much about, you remember?" asked the girl, stirring with her foot a

few mournful bits of rubbish that lay near the piano.
"Sic transit gloria mundi!" growled Stern, shaking his head. "You and she were the same
age, almost. And now--"
Silent and