“We left off at the place where the bird fell from his neck—no, just after that, where he falls asleep, as well he might, after it was gone.”
The moon was now peeping, in little spots of light, through the higher foliage, and casting a doubtful, ghostly sediment of shine around them. The night was warm. Glow-worms lay here and there, brooding out green light in the bosom of the thick soft grass. There was no wind save what the swift wing of a bat, sweeping close to their heads, would now and then awake. The creature came and vanished like an undefined sense of evil at hand. But it was only Richard who thought that; nothing such crossed the starry clearness of Barbara's soul. Her skirt made a buttony noise with the heads of the rib-grass. Her red cloak was dark in the moonlight. She threw back the hood, and coming out of its shadow like another moon from a cloud, walked the earth with bare head. Her hands too were bare, and glimmered in the night-gleam. He saw the rings on the small fingers shimmer and shine: she was as fond of colour and flash as lord St. Albans! Higher and higher rose the moon. Her light on the grass-blades wove them into a carpet with its weft of faint moonbeams. The small dull mirrors of the evergreen leaves glinted in the thickets, as the two went by, like the bits of ill-polished glass in an Indian tapestry. The moon was everywhere, filling all the hollow over-world, and for ever alighting on their heads. Far away they saw the house, a remote something, scarce existent in the dreaming night, the gracious-ghastly poem, and the mingling, harmonizing moon. It was much too far away to give them an anxious thought, and for long it seemed, like death, to be coming no nearer; but they were moving toward it all the time, and it was even growing a move insistent fact. Thus they walked at once in the two blended worlds of the moonlight and the tale, while Richard half-chanted the music-speech of the most musical of poets, telling of the roaring wind that the mariner did not feel, of the flags of electric light, of the dances of the wan stars, of the sighing of the sails, of the star-dogged moon, and the torrent-like falls of the lightning down the mountainous cloud—for so Barbara, who had seen two or three tropical thunder-storms, explained to Richard the lightning which
“fell with never a jag,
A river steep and wide;”
—until that groan arose from the dead men, and the bodies heaved themselves up on their feet, and began to work the ropes, and worked on till sunrise, and the mariner knew that not the old souls but angels had entered into them, by their gathering about the mast, and sending such a strange lovely hymn through their dead throats up to the sun.
When Richard repeated the stanza—
“It ceased; yet still the sails made on
A pleasant noise till noon,
A noise like of a hidden brook
In the leafy month of June,
That to the sleeping woods all night
Singeth a quiet tune;”
Barbara uttered a prolonged “Oh!” and again was silent, listening to the talk of the elemental spirits, feeling the very wind of home that blew on the mariner, seeing the lighthouse, and the hill, and the weathercock on the church-spire, and the white bay, and the shining seraphs with the crimson shadows, and the sinking ship, and the hermit that made the mariner tell his story as he was telling it now.
But when Richard came to the words—
“He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small,
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all,”
she clapped her hands together; and when he ended them, she cried out—