CHAPTER IV.
STORM.
“And all talk died, as in a grove all song
Beneath the shadow of some bird of prey;
Then a long silence came upon the hall,
And Modred thought, ‘The time is hard at hand.’”
“In the shaken trees the chill stars shake.
Hush! Heard you a horse tread as you spake,
Little Brother?”
That night the wind shifted to the south-west, and the storm that came thundering in from the Atlantic was the worst I had known since I came to Durrus. The rain had been coming down in furious floods ever since sunset, and as the night darkened in, the wind dashed it against my window till I thought the sashes must give way. The roaring of the storm in the trees never ceased, and once or twice, through the straining and lashing of the branches, I heard the crash of a falling bough. The house was full of sounds. The rattling of the ill-fitting windows, the knocking of the picture-frames against the walls of the corridor, the loud drip of water from a leak in the skylight into a bath placed to catch it in the hall. Somewhere in the house a door was banging incessantly. It maddened me to hear it, more especially now, when I was trying to determine by the sound if the door which had just been opened was that of Willy’s room. He surely must be in the house on a night like this; and yet his door had been open, and his room dark, when I had passed it on my way up to bed an hour ago.
Since he had left me in the plantation—left me sitting there in stunned horror, with the rain beating down through the laurels upon me—I had not seen or heard anything of him. He had gone without another word of explanation, without saying anything to qualify that last speech, or that could give any clue to the cause of it. It was all dark, inexplicable. I could only sit over my fire in impotent anxiety, my brain toiling with confused surmises, and my heart heavy with apprehension.
I think I never was as fond of Willy, or as truly unhappy about him, as now, when I had just received from him a slight, the idea even of which I should a few months ago have laughed at. I did not care about my own point of view—I even forgot it, in my consuming desire to find out the reason of Willy’s mysterious behaviour during the last two days. Nothing that had gone before threw any light upon the problem, unless, indeed, Michael Brian’s threat that night of the bonfire had had some incredibly sinister meaning. No, there was no adequate solution; but the bellowing of the wind in the chimney, and the sliding clatter of a slate falling down the roof, brought home to me the one tangible fact that he was still out of the house, at twelve o’clock on the wildest night of the year.
The next day was Sunday. The storm raged steadily on, putting all possibility of going to church out of the question. The shutters on the western side of the house were all closed, and I sat in the semi-darkness of the library, trying to read, and looking from time to time through the one unshuttered window out on to the gravel sweep. Broken twigs and pieces torn from the weather-slated walls were strewed over the ground. A great sycamore had fallen across the drive a little below the house, and the other trees swung and writhed as if in despair at the long stress of the gale.
Roche came in and out of the room on twenty different pretexts during the day, and made each an occasion for ventilating some new theory to explain Willy’s absence. I was kneeling on the window-seat, looking out into the turmoil, as the wind hurried the black rain-clouds across the sky, and the gloomy daylight faded into night, when he came into the room again.