CHAPTER XIII
A MOONLIGHT PIPING
Lady Anne Garland was sitting by her bedroom window. It was wide open, and the perfume of the night-stocks below the terrace rose fragrant in the still air. The atmosphere was darkly luminous, blue and purple, in which the shapes of the trees and bushes stood out softly black in the light of a half-moon.
Away across the park, with its scattered oaks and beeches, she could see masses of woodland lying like dark patches on the distant hills. In the valley the lights in the cottages had been extinguished. One by one they had dropped into the darkness, and now the whole village lay asleep.
Anne leaned her arms on the window-sill and looked out into the night. She had not yet begun to prepare for bed, and she still wore the silver-grey dress she had put on for dinner. [Pg 128]The light from two candles on the dressing-table behind her illumined the room, glinting on silver-backed brushes and silver-topped bottles. The walls of the room were white, and above the bed hung an ebony crucifix with a silver Figure. The black cross stood out in startling relief on the white wall-paper. A table beside her bed held a bowl of crimson roses, an unlighted reading-lamp, and a green-covered book, the title printed in gold letters. Between the leaves was an ivory paper-cutter. The leaves, however, had long since been cut; and for the sixth—the seventh—time Anne was reading Under the Span of the Rainbow.
Suddenly Anne’s ear was arrested by a sound—a faint sound, but the unmistakable crunch of feet on gravel. The sound came from the drive. She drew back into the room, extinguishing one candle and moving the other so that its light did not illumine the square of open window. Then from behind the curtain she watched and listened.
The sound of the feet drew nearer, and a man emerged from the shadow of the trees in the drive. He walked unfalteringly. It was [Pg 129]not the wary approach of one who fears to be seen.
Below the terrace he halted. Anne quickly extinguished the second candle, and leant a little from her hiding-place by the curtain. The man looked up, the moonlight falling full on his face, and Anne saw that it was Peter the Piper. Her breath came quickly and she watched, herself unseen.
She saw him lift his pipe to his lips, and then the still night became full of music. This time Anne made no attempt to classify his theme—to read a story in the melody. Probably it held none. It was music—music pure and simple, which the Piper was playing for her alone.