He stood on a level place strewn with stones, and their grey colour grew into the grey of the mist that bound him. It was very quiet. Afar off there was a faint sound of water, but the beating of his own heart was louder. He held his breath, peering this way and that, but keeping his feet steady lest the noise they made should break the stillness and enrage that something which seemed to wait until he moved. He stood, thinking quickly and anxiously. He must find some way out of this danger, he must keep cool; but he almost screamed when he heard a light scattering of stones, followed by a cry. It was only an old sheep that went bleating away behind the veil, but he could not smile at his alarm. He began to run to and fro, seeking some landmark, and when he found a little trickling stream he thought it would be wise to follow it down the mountain-side. Oncoming darkness was now added to his fears, but he could still see the silver streak, and beside it, walking in steep, oozing moss, he went carefully; nervous, but still hopeful, when he found there were rocks to be descended. Using his shaking hands, he clambered down, absorbed and unforeseeing, and it was almost dark when he came to a ledge that ended with a shocking suddenness. He could not go down. He looked up, and he was afraid. He could not turn his back to that awful emptiness, and climb the steep rocks he could hardly see; his own daring of descent amazed him. He was a little giddy; he blinked in the darkness. He would have to stay there, shivering and afraid. He was having his adventure and he did not like it, but across his troubled thoughts words of Theresa came, bracing him to courage.
"I hope I'm brave," she said to him one day, inflecting her voice inquiringly.
"I hope so, too," he answered, and felt a pang.
"I like brave people," she said. "I like them to be brave and clever."
"Not good?" he asked.
"Oh—good——" That was a lesser virtue.
He was not good, nor clever, nor brave, but he would endure, and all night long he sat there, trying to control his dread of the mist and what lay beyond it, stifling the screams that threatened when a stone fell, crashing, dropping from rock to rock, and, hundreds of feet below, breaking itself into ultimate fragments on the screes. "Not again," he prayed. "Not again." So he might fall, but he must not, he would not, and he sat farther back upon his ledge, gripping the wet heather.
He thought of Nancy, of Grace and Theresa in their beds: Nancy, with her hand under her cheek, and the humorous, half-mocking smile on her lips, even in sleep; Grace, with her nose in the pillow, and Theresa widespread, tossing her tawny head. Heaven keep them and him! If only the darkness had not been so thick—thick, yet unsteady, promising cracks of light which did not come, and, as he grew more dazed, taking unwelcome shapes of small and evil things, of things nameless, gigantic, formless, yet hideous in suggestion, that came slyly through the folds of mist to push him from his place. Only with a wrenching effort of will could he drive them back, and as they went he thought he heard them chuckling. And again they came with their wavering, softly threatening movements; he strained his eyes for them, there was a terrible expanded feeling in his ears, and the mist and darkness were weighted with horror which pressed about him. His tired eyelids drooped, and he may have slept, but if he did he found no relief from fear; sleeping and waking he was stalked by ugly visions, and he was cold. He thought of the people he had seen shivering in winter streets; so this was how they felt in their rags. Perhaps, too, they had this dreadful vacancy of body, which was not hunger, but resulted from it so that now and then he seemed to be floating in mid-air, a man without a frame, compelled to drive his numbed fingers into the wet earth to bring himself back to a sense of solidity and self.
But somehow the night wore through, and with eyes that were wearied with straining past the dark, that heavy curtain seemed at last to be growing thin. It was still black, but the texture of it was changing. A little breeze went by, like a herald bird promising the day. There came a fresh smell of wind and earth. Slowly the night was mastered.
There was no glowing pageantry of dawn; the light spread and grew stronger in grey dignity, and soon he could see the glistening mosses and tender ferns that grew in the crevices of the rocks, and, looking from these things of vivid green, he could draw from the grey light about him the forms of distant hills.