“To bed wi’ ye then!” cried Mrs. Cluett indignantly. “Us be a-goin’ too—’tis late enough.”
She took up the lamp as she spoke, and roused Alice by a jerk of the sleeve. Adam went creaking upstairs, and threw himself dressed upon his bed. The atmosphere of his little attic-room, sun-baked as it had been through all that breathless day, was like that of a furnace; he felt his brain reel and was oppressed almost to suffocation. The storm continued, flash after flash playing on his narrow window; he could see the tip of his one fir-tree, now motionless, transfixed as it were, now swaying in a puff of wind that died away as suddenly as it came.
The house was very silent now, and permeated by the odour of Mrs. Cluett’s recently extinguished lamp. Adam sat up gasping. He thought of the Warren—of the close-growing trees stretching away about the free and happy man who dwelt beneath them. Once he, too, had stood with the woods wrapping him round, and the stars of heaven over his head. Tewley must look grand to-night. As he thought of it the dark shadowy forms of the trees seemed to press upon him; he could hear their deep breathing, and share their expectancy.
Ha! there was a flash. How it would light up the beeches and play among the pines. Now the thunder! it would roar and reverberate among those billowing trees. The rain would come soon. First there would be a rush of wind, and ash and oak and beech would rustle and shiver, and the larches sway down all their slender length. And then, while the trees were bending and rocking, the rain would come—the cold, heavy, glorious rain. Adam caught his breath as he thought of it—how it would come down, hissing among the leaves, splashing on the hot ground! How good the wet earth would smell, every strand of moss and fibre of grass adding its own spicy fragrance.
He leaped from his bed and almost at the same moment the tree outside his window was caught by a whirling wind and snapped. Then something seemed to snap, too, in Adam’s brain and he laughed aloud. What was he doing there, in that suffocating room, when he was free to go that moment, if he chose, to Tewley Woods? What should hold him back—what should keep him? If he made haste he might yet reach the Warren in time for the rain.
In another moment he was out of the house, and when the next flash of lightning came it revealed a flying figure scudding along the whiteness of the road.
Alice cried bitterly over the defection of her wild man of the woods, but she consoled herself in time, and took a mate more to her mind, a practical person who sowed cabbages in the flower-border, and considered the view of the new brewery the finest in the neighbourhood.
But Adam Baverstock had passed for ever out of her life; as silently as he had come from the shadow of the trees into the spring sunshine, so had he vanished in the summer storm.