“Strength and cunning,” the first voice wailed forth again, “alone possess their heart’s desire. All else is vain and empty.”
“Love and Sacrifice,” retorted the other, “outlast all victories. Beyond the circle of life they rule the darkness, and death is dust beneath their feet.”
Crouched on a branch of his protecting sycamore, the thin wraith of Jimmy Pringle trembled and shook like an aspen-leaf. A dumb surprise possessed the poor transmuted thing to find itself even less assured of palpable and familiar salvation, than when, after drinking cider at the Boar’s Head in Athelston, he had dreamed dreams at Captain Whiffley’s gate.
“The Sun is lord and god of the earth,” wailed the first voice once more. “The Sun alone is master in the end. Lust and Power go forth with him, and all flesh obeys his command.”
“The Moon draws more than the tides,” answered the second voice. “In the places of silence where Love waits, only the Moon can pass; and only the Moon can hear the voice of the watchers.”
From the red planet, high up against the church-tower, to the silver planet low down among the shadowy trees, the starlit spaces listened mutely to these antiphonal invocations. Only the distant expanse of the Milky Way, too remote in its translunar gulfs to heed these planetary conflicts, shimmered haughtily down upon the Wood and Stone of Nevilton—impassive, indifferent, unconcerned.
CHAPTER XX
VOX POPULI
James Andersen’s mental state did not fall away from the restored equilibrium into which the unexpected intervention of Ninsy Lintot had magnetized and medicined him. He went about his work as usual, gloomier and more taciturn, perhaps, than before, but otherwise with no deviation from his normal condition.