He moved across the room and went out of the cliff door. His gaunt limbs and shaggy robe were seen one instant against the palisades, as if his eye were passing that starlit valley in review, the picture in miniature of the great west. He was gone while Tonty looked at him.
The whisper of water at the base of the rock, and of the sea’s sweet song in pines, took the place of the voice which had spoken.
A lad began to carol within the fortress, but hushed himself with sudden remembrance. That brooding body of darkness, which so overlies us all that its daily removal by sunlight is a continued miracle, pressed around this silent room resisted only by one feeble candle. And Tonty stood motionless in the room, blanched and exalted by what he had seen.
Barbe’s opening her chamber door startled him and set in motion the arrested machinery of life.
“What has been here, monsieur?” she asked under her breath.
Tonty, without replying, moved to receive her, crushing under his foot a beech-nut which one of the children of the fortress had dropped upon the floor. Barbe’s arms girded his great chest.
“Oh, monsieur,” she said with a sob, “I thought I heard a voice in this room, and I know I would myself break through death to come back to you!”