The priest’s voice changed. Berry knew that he was weeping. “Eh, what shall I say? I am an old man. I have no children of my flesh. . . He is mad, and Judic is very mad too, and very old. . . She says they are there, the children. She says that she sees their faces between the light and the dark. Small happy faces under a whiteness like the veils of the First Communion. Eh, we are very old and we have seen too much. . . So she makes the little toys still, singing as she twists the paper. And she takes her basket to the steps of the school, and sits there as she did use to—and—sells them. What do I say? I know not what she does, or what is given her. . . Only that she returns, and sometimes her basket is. . . empty. . .”
“And the madman in there?”
“Is Kurt Von Eichensau. Yes.” Presently he added, “If you do not object, I will open the door. If the door is shut, it causes him to make an outcry. We do not want a noise. You need not fear, he will not come out. He will not cross that threshold where stand the little children he killed.”
When dawn, colourless and cold as the moonlight it replaced, drew a faint line along the rim of the ruined land, Berry slowly climbed the path that led him back to his world. Once he stopped and raised a hand to the curé, standing—though Berry could not see him—in the soot-black shadow of the church; where the one window still glowed dimly, like a watching eye whose light was soon to be quenched. Again he stopped, and looked at something that lay in his hand; it was a little paper windmill which Judic had given him out of her basket for a keepsake. But he stopped a third time by a little bush which grew on the slope, where a few green spires promised crocuses. He stuck the windmill-stick in the earth; the gaudy little toy began to twirl merrily in the wind.
“I won’t take it away,” said Berry jerkily to himself, “the kids—might miss it.”
The ridge rose behind him and hid St. Aubyn. Striding very quickly, he went on to meet the dawn.
TWO WAYS
“There’s another!” Charron rested his pick amongst the shale, and glanced across at the flanks of Mount Morin, where a new snow-field had broken loose from its moorings, and plunged into the tremendous valley in a spout of diamond dust, with a roar that jarred the rocks. There had been early snow in the hills, followed by warm weather; and the lordly heights of the Nicolum were stripping themselves of their frozen cloaks. Charron looked uneasily at the ranges, then glanced at his chum. “Jack,” he went on, with some hesitation, “I guess the time’s come to decide if both of us, or only one, can go out this year.”
Men don’t speak of leaving the Nicolum before the winter, or of going down from it, or away from it. They say “going out,” and it’s an expressive phrase.
Jack Rainger straightened slowly; a tall fellow, grave, and a little stiff in the back; stiff, you would have said, in the will, too. He smiled across at Charron’s fair-haired, sanguine youth, saying: “Then we’ll have to decide which one’s to go, for there isn’t enough dust to take us both out on a holiday, and bring us both back again in the spring!”