Leysin stood, intently listening, his big head throwing a grotesque shadow on wall and ceiling.
‘Hark!’ he exclaimed, half whispering. ‘Do you hear that? Listen.’
A deep sound, confused and roaring, passed across the night, far away, and slightly booming. It entered the little room so that the air seemed to tremble a moment. To Hendricks it held something ominous.
‘The wind,’ he whispered, as the noise died off into the distance; ‘yet a moment ago the night was still enough. The stars were shining.’ There was tense excitement in the room just then. It showed in Leysin’s face, which had gone white as a cloth. Hendricks himself felt extraordinarily stirred.
‘Not wind, but human voices,’ the older man said quickly. ‘It’s shouting. Listen!’ and his eyes ran round the room, coming to rest finally in a corner where his hat and cloak hung from a nail. A gesture accompanied the look. He wanted to be out. The tutor half rose to take his leave. ‘You have duties to-night elsewhere,’ he stammered. ‘I’m forgetting.’ His own instinct was to get away himself with Bindy by the first early diligence. He was afraid of yielding.
‘Hush!’ whispered Leysin peremptorily. ‘Listen!’
He opened the window at the top, and through the crack, where the stars peeped brightly, there came, louder than before, the uproar of human voices floating through the night from far away. The air of the great pine forests came in with it. Hendricks listened intently a moment. He positively jumped to feel a hand upon his arm. Leysin’s big head was thrust close up into his face.
‘That’s the commotion in the village,’ he whispered. ‘A messenger has come and gone; some one has gone back with him. To-night I shall be needed—down here, but to-morrow night when the great ritual takes place—up there——!’
Hendricks tried to push him away so as not to hear the words; but the little man seemed immovable as a rock. The impulse remained probably in the mind without making the muscles work. For the tutor, sorely tempted, longed to dare, yet faltered in his will.
‘——if you felt like taking the risk,’ the words continued seductively, ‘we might place the empty vessel near enough to let it fill, then rescue it, charged with energy, in the nick of time.’ And the Pasteur’s eyes were aglow with enthusiasm, his voice even trembling at the thought of high adventure to save another’s soul.