Could not some wizard, some magic wish-giver, come to his aid, wave a wand to lift her out of this silent world and place her at his side, here on the cliff-top? Night putting her arms around the sea. No helping wizard. Just the earth going to bed the same as it had done for a million years, prosy, practical and prompt. Were no more wonders worked since sprites and fairies left the haunts of Man? Yet it was magic, too, this—so Geoffrey would have said—the sun sinking in the sea at dusk and rising on the land at dawn. And so it looked in truth. Gorgeous colours, violet, rose and silver-grey, moving, changing, mingling aswirl. The day of Mystery, wonder stuff and witchcraft, of elves and goblins, jinns and mermaids, fading into quiet dark like the peaceful, sleepy ending of enchanted dreams.
Was it the Twilight of Magic? Perhaps. But only today’s. Magic could never die while the sun had the power to rise again and Man had the wish to seek.
Giles pulled his rough cloak more closely about his shoulders. If tomorrow’s work should bring no more than today’s, he asked himself, what then? He would have failed. A great finder he, failing his master in his worst need!
And had he really tried his hardest? His conscience nagged at him unmercifully. That little voice of gladness had so often whispered. Could it be said that the only time he failed was when the King sent him seeking his own great love?
No, no, no! That should not be. He would not be beaten. She must be found. Soon he would run into his finder’s luck again if he only kept on. And what was he wasting time for here, standing and thinking and looking at sunsets, when there was so much need for haste? A day, a few hours only, and he would have to send word to the castle: yes or no.
He took up his staff, which had fallen to the ground. But before turning away from the brink of the cliff he gave a last glance at the sea. It was much darker now and his eyes could no longer make out the sails of the tiny craft creeping along the edge of the world. The ocean would always be linked in his mind with Agnes, the roar of surf, the Whispering Shell. Oh, if he only had it now! In the time of two days, Barbara would surely have spoken of him, or, if she had been kidnapped, then the men who held her would. For their greatest fear must be of him, the King’s Finder.
He hurried away across the turf towards the road by which he had come.
Yes, the shell would have been a great help. Yet how could he have taken it? He had promised and given it to the Princess Sophronia. It was no longer his. And no power would have made her give it up willingly. It was a strange thing, that shell. From long experience of it he had grown to look on its queer powers as something quite everyday and ordinary—like a window in your house where you went to listen for the voices of returning children or the barking of your dog. Yet it was strange—magic or science, mystery or common sense, who would ever find out? What a pity the King had cast it from him that night! And yet perhaps not. It could bring evil as well as aid. That was certain.
Well, he must do without it now and get on with his business.
The road he was seeking was a small cart-track which led up to these cliffs from the village he had last halted at. In that village he had left Midnight and the clothes he had worn when he had ridden away from the castle. He hoped, as he peered about him in the half-dark, that the keeper of the inn who had stabled his horse would also have prepared a good supper for himself. He was terribly hungry.