CHAPTER II
n the first moment of astonishment, John stood motionless, his gaze riveted on the glow of color that poured through the window upon the rocks and heather of the cleft. Then, as he continued to stand with widely opened eyes, another surprise was sprung upon him. The door of the chapel opened and the figure of his uncle—long since supposed to be sleeping tranquilly in his own room—showed tall and angular in the aperture.
From John's position, the open door and the lighted interior of the little edifice were distinctly visible; and in one glance he saw his uncle's silhouetted figure and behind it a bare space some dozen feet square, lined on floor and walls with sections of marble alternately black and white. From the ceiling of this chamber depended an octagonal symbol in polished metal, and close by the door eight wax candles flickered slightly in the faint stir of air. But his astonished and inquisitive eyes had barely become aware of these details when Andrew Henderson turned towards the circular sconce in which the candles were set and began to extinguish them one by one. As the light died, he stepped forward and John drew back sharply; but at his movement a stone, loosened by his heel, went rolling down into the hollow. And a moment later his uncle, glancing up, saw his figure outlined against the luminous sky.
What the outcome of the incident would have been on any other occasion, it is difficult to say. As it was, the moment was propitious. Old Henderson, surprised in an instant of exaltation, was pleased to put his own narrow, superstitious construction on the boy's appearance. Laboring under an abnormal excitement, he showed no resentment at the fact of being spied upon; but calling John to him, ordered him to walk home beside him across the cliff.
Never was walk so strange—never were companions so ill-matched as the two who threaded their way back over the headland. Andrew Henderson walked first, talking all the time in a jargon addressed partly to the boy, partly to himself, in which mysticism was oddly tangled with a confusion of crazy theories and beliefs; behind came John, half fascinated and wholly bewildered by the medley of words that poured out upon the night.