Then, too, voices began to sound somewhere in the air, but he could not tell whether they were actually in the room, or outside in the night, or only within himself—in his own head:—strange, faint voices, whispering, laughing, shouting, crying; fragments of stories, rhymes, riddles, odd names of people and places jostled one another with varying degrees of clearness, now loud, now soft, till he wondered what it all meant, and longed for the light to come.
But besides all this, something else, too, was abroad that night—something he could not name or even think about without shaking with terror down at the very roots of his being. And when he thought of this, his heart called loudly for the governess, and the people hidden in the shadows of the room seemed quite useless and unable to help.
Thus he hovered between the two worlds and the two memories, phantoms and realities shifting and changing places every few minutes.
A little light would have saved him much suffering. If only the moon were up! Moonlight would have made all the difference. Even a moon half hidden and misty would have put the shadows farther away from him.
"Dear old misty moon!" he cried half aloud to himself upon the bed, "why aren't you here to-night? My last night!"
Misty Moon, Misty Moon! The words kept ringing in his head. Misty Moon, Misty Moon! They swam round in his blood in an odd, tumultuous rhythm. Every time the current of blood passed through his brain in the course of its circulation it brought the words with it, altered a little, and singing like a voice.
Like a voice! Suddenly he made the discovery that it actually was a voice—and not his own. It was no longer the blood singing in his veins, it was some one singing outside the window. The sound began faintly and far away, up above the trees; then it came gradually nearer, only to die away again almost to a whisper.
If it was not the voice of the governess, he could only say it was a very good imitation of it.
The words forming out of the empty air rose and fell with the wind, and, taking his thoughts, flung them in a stream through the dark sky towards the hidden, misty moon:
"O misty moon,
Dear, misty moon,
The nights are long without thee;
The shadows creep
Across my sleep,
And fold their wings about me!"