Yet somehow, by unregistered degrees and secretly, they loosened the joints of his armour day by day and hour by hour.
CHAPTER IX
All the Powers that vivify nature must be children, for all the fairies, and gnomes, the goblins, yes, and the great giants too, are only different sizes and shapes and characters of children.—George MacDonald.
It was a week later, and Paul was smoking his evening pipe on the lawn before dinner. His sister was in London for a couple of days. Mlle. Fleury had gone to the dentist in the neighbouring town and had not yet returned. The children, consequently, had been running rather wild.
The sun had barely disappeared, when the full moon, rising huge and faint in the east, cast a silvery veil over the gardens and the wood. The night came treading softly down the sky, passing with an almost visible presence from the hills to the motionless trees in the valley, and then sinking gently and mysteriously down into the very roots of the grass and flowers.
During the day there had been rain—warm showers alternating with dazzling sunshine as in April—and now the earth, before going to sleep, was sending out great wafts of incense. Paul sniffed it in with keen enjoyment.
The odour of burning wood floated to him over the tree-tops, hanging a little heavily in the moist atmosphere; he thought of a hundred fires of his own making—elsewhere, far away! ‘And grey dawns saw his camp-fires in the rain,’ he murmured.
He wandered down to the Larch Gate, so called by the children because the larches stood there about the entrance of the wood like the porch of some forest temple. He halted, listening to the faint drip-drip of the trees, and as he listened, he thought; and his thoughts, like stones falling through a deep sea, sank down into the depths of him where so little light was that no words came to give them form or substance.
Overhead, the blue lanes of the sky down which the sunlight had poured all day were slowly softening for the coming of the stars; and in himself the plastic depths, he felt, were a-stirring, as though some great change that he could not alter or control were about to take place in him. He was aware of an unwonted undercurrent of excitement in his blood. It seemed to him that there was ‘something afoot,’ although he had no evidence to warrant the suspicion.
‘Something’s up to-night,’ he murmured between the puffs of his pipe. ‘There’s something in the air!’