But no new command came to us from the spirit-world. It was now within two weeks of the hour set for the DESCENT, and Gabrielle and I wondered that we should not hear again of the mysterious matter. Need we doubt? See how the current of events foretold the END! That last night at the old home in St. Choiseul I shall never forget. We sat together in the big library throughout the night expecting some sudden GUIDANCE from the Unknown. We said very little. The weight of our purpose had withdrawn us from the companionship of our neighbors, and for weeks we had lived alone in a reserve of solitude, of wondering suspense, that also tied our tongues. We had become stupefied with the terror of this admission to the supernatural, as if we were holding the hands of the Creator! Did we believe? Gabrielle did, and—I will confess it—I linked it all with the phantasmagoria of events of the hideous war, as something possible—just possible.
That was the end of September. We must be at the Chateau of La Ferté the following night if punctuality counted in this tremendous eventuality. And of course it did count. How exactly GOD had given his commands to Moses and Joshua, to Barak and to Gideon, to Jephthah, to David, to Solomon, to Elijah! So instinctively we grouped ourselves with the designs of Providence as indeed commissioned agents of its ends.
It was almost morning; the eastern sky reddening with flakes of fire scattered over it, and the light entering the room from the south wall of the garden, where the clustering vines hung untouched and forgotten; when Gabrielle spoke to me.
"Alfred have you any doubts? The time is short for our preparation. Tonight we should be at La Ferté."
"I will go with you Gabrielle. Would you go alone?"
And my sister answered in the words of Barak to Deborah:
"'If thou will go with me then I will go; but if thou will not go with me, then I will not go.'"
"Gabrielle all issues are with God. I will go with you."
Later, when the day had fully broken, and the sunlight flooded everything without and within the house, and, from its singular clarity, the not usual picture of the Eiffel Tower, far off in Zeppelin-haunted Paris, was just descried as a hazy skein of lines in the sky—we were both looking at it—the front door was assailed with a furious knocking. I ran to it and opening it encountered Privat Deschat with a paper in his hands, his face convulsed with emotion, his mouth wide open, and crowded with insulting epithets, that he flung upon me with such emphasis that, for an instant, I thought I was the occasion of his rage. But it was not so. It was what he read that had startled him into this unaccustomed excitement and denunciation.