These questions came up answerless, like deep-sea plummets where no bottom is. I saw the way no farther on than this; that I must go straightway to Jennifer and tell him all. Beyond that point the darkness was Egyptian, and I could only hope that tricky fate would turn again and blot me out, and make it plain to Richard, and to my dear lady, that love, and not base treachery, had set me on to do as I had done.
In some such dismal grindings of the mill of thought the hours of waiting were outworn at length; and when the sun was dipping to the mountains in the west I rose and washed me in the brook, and afterward constrained myself to eat what Tomas had prepared for me.
The sunset glow was fading in the upper air, and underneath the canopy of leaves the wood was darkening on to twilight, when I made ready to be gone. Because I thought I might have need of it before the night was done, I buckled on the heirloom sword; and telling Tomas and the other blacks for their own safety to keep an alarm guard waking through the night, I sallied forth upon my errand.
I've wished a thousand times, as I sit here before the fire and jot these memories down in crabbed black on white, that I could conjure up for you some speaking picture of this scene primeval in which the story moves.
True, its hills and valleys are the same; the river keeps its course; and in the west the mountain sky-line is unchanged. But here similitude is at an end. You've hacked the virgin forest into shapes and fringes where once it was an ample mantle seamed only by the rivers, and frayed here and there at distant intervals by the settler's ax.
Beneath this mantle lay a world unlike the world you know. Plunged in its furtive depths you felt the spell of nature's mystery upon you; the mystery of the hoary wood, age-old, steeped in the nepenthe of the centuries. In brightest summer day, which, in these forest aisles, became a misty green translucence, the silence, the vastness, the solitude laid each a finger on you, bidding you go softly all the way. But in the twilight hour the real held still more aloof, and all the shadows bristled with dim fantastic shapes to awe and affright the alien-born.
I was not alien-born. From earliest childhood I had known and loved these forest solitudes. Yet now, as when I was a little lad, the twilight shadows awed me. Here it was a gnarled and twisted tree-trunk so like a crouching panther that I sprang aside and had the steel half out before the clearer vision came. There it was the figure of a man gliding stealthily from tree to tree, it seemed; keeping even pace with me as if with sinister intent.
I pushed on faster, drawing the sword to keep me better company, though inwardly I scoffed and jeered at this new twittering of the nerves. What threat was there for me in silent shadows in the wood? The dogs I had to fear were bred in British kennels, and there was never any lack of clamor when they were beating up a cover.
Yet this persistent shadow clung upon my footsteps until from casting furtive glances sidewise I came to holding it craftily in the tail of my eye. 'Twas surely moving as I moved, and surely drawing nearer. I picked a time and place, measured my distance, and darting suddenly aside, sent home a thrust which should have pinned the phantom to a tree.
"Ugh! What for Captain Long-knife want kill the tree?"