Suddenly he fancied he heard far away the rumble of the receding waggon-wheels. A numb stillness succeeded. The earth seemed to breathe its last, and a napkin of cloud was softly flung over the dead face of it. The lungs of the day fell in; a few large bitter drops slipped from the closed lids of the heavens.
Straight, and in a moment, Ned sprang alert to a sense of peril. This ominous oppressiveness was nothing but the forereach of a swiftly advancing thunderstorm—but the trees and every green spire toppling into cloud an invitation to its own destruction! He must race for cover—and whither? The little hut beyond the clearing! It presented itself to him in a flash. He set off running.
The very enforced action was a tonic to his nerves. As he sped, the darkness gathered around him deep and deeper. He ran in a livid twilight. Then on the quicker beat of a pulse the wood was torn with fire from hem to hem. He was dazzled, half-shocked to a pause for an instant; but there had been a panic sound to drive him forward again directly—a huge tearing noise within the monstrous slam that had trodden upon the heels of the blaze. He could only guess what this portended. At the very first explosion a tree of the forest had been struck and riven.
Now he scurried so fast that the breath sobbed a little in his throat. He had a feeling that the Force was dodging him, heading him off from reach of shelter. Not a soul did he meet, but formless shadows seemed to cry him on from deep to lonelier deep of the maze. Then again a sudden glare took him in the face like a whip; and at once the Furies of the storm burst from restraint and danced upon the woods in fire and water, rehearsing the very carmagnole of the Terror.
All in a moment the fugitive broke into the clearing he sought, but had dreaded he would miss. Even as he ran—half deafened, yet relieved by the uproar that had succeeded a silence as awful as it was inhuman—he must slacken his pace in view of the towering giant that dominated his every strange memory connected with the place. Suddenly he stopped altogether, staring at the great tumorous trunk. Where had he read or heard that beech-trees were secure from stroke by lightning? Should he stand by, here under shelter of the enormous withered arms? In his trouble he might scarcely notice how the whole character of the isolated spot in which he stood was converted from that that figured in his memory. Yet he took it in vaguely by the sickly light—the blue-painted iron railings, having a locked wicket, that fenced in the sacred bole; the gleaming silver hearts hung here and there about the bark; the cropped ribbon of sward that encircled the tree. Yet upon this green, for all its cultivated trimness, he could have thought the underwood was encroached; and dimly he recalled St Denys’s prophecy: “If in years to come thou tell’st me this charmed circle has been broken into by the thicket, I will answer that elsewhere the people stand on the daïses of kings.” Surely the idle prediction was strangely verified.
Even where he stood, for all the little shelter of the high branches, the tempest beat the breath out of his body. Every moment the crash and welter and uproar took a more hellish note and aspect: he felt he could not stand it much longer.
Suddenly, twisting about from a vision of fierce light, he caught a startled glimpse of something he had hitherto failed to notice. The narrow track that had once led through the heart of the thicket to the hut amongst the trees was a narrow track no longer. It had been opened out and greatly widened, so as to give passage to a tiny chapel that stood at the close of a short vista of trunks.
With a gasp of relief, Ned raced for this unexpected refuge, dashed up a step, threw himself against the door, and half stumbled into a void beyond it. The door flapped to behind him. He stood, panting, in a little crypt of scented gloom. Somewhere in front a single ruby star glowed unwavering—a core of utter peace and quiet.
CHAPTER VII.
The thunder and the storm roared overhead with a deadened sound; not a breath of all the turmoil could touch the serenity of the star. It burned without a flutter, diffusing, even, the slightest, gentlest radiance throughout the tiny building. Ned, from his position near the door, could make out the whitewashed walls and ceiling; the wee square windows glazed with twilight as sleek and dusky as oxydised silver; the little litter of chairs about the floor; the altar overhung by some indistinguishable dark picture; most suggestively, most spectrally, the very painted statue at whose feet the star itself was glowing.