CHAPTER XVIII—THE SIGN BY THE WAY
At noon on a certain Thursday, seven days after his arrival, the Duke of Dorset set out to shoot quail in the river bottom south of the château. A shower of rain had fallen in the morning. The air was clear and bright. The mountains gleamed as in a mirror, the haze, by some optical illusion, banked behind them. The vigor of spring, by some trick of Nature, seemed to have crept back into the earth; to swim in the dark waters of the river; to lie at the root of the grasses; to swell under the bark of the fir tree, waiting for a day or two of sun. The great principle of life, waning in the autumn, seemed moving, potent, on the point of recovering its vitality, as under some April shower. Birds fluttered in the thickets, as though seized with a nesting instinct; the cattle wandered in their pasture; new blades started green at the roots of the brown turf; and, now and then, as though misled, as though tricked, a little flower opened to the sun.
The man, walking through the fields, the meadows, over the moist leaves, received, like every other thing, his share of this subtle influence. The clean air whipped his blood; that virility, warming in the grasses, in the green stem of the flower, under the bark of the fir tree, warmed, too, in every fiber of his body.
He walked on, following the high bank of the river, forgetting the red setter at his heels, the gun tucked under his arm. Quail got up and whirred to distant thickets, the woodcock arose from some corner of the swamp, but the gun remained under the cover of his arm. He felt somehow, on this afternoon, a certain sympathy with these little people of the fields—with the robin and his brown lady. Under what principle of selection had they mated? What trick of manner had favored this dapper gallant? What thing of special beauty had set this thicket belle, in his eye, above her rivals? The riddle, as he turned it, lifted to a broader application.
Was not that mystery a thing hidden as no other mystery moving in this world is hidden? When the King Cophetua caught up the beggar maid for queen, could he give a reason for it? Was it the blue eye that did it, or the red mouth? Other eyes were blue, other mouths, in his court, were red. Did he know any better what it was than this brown fellow in his tree top? Did one ever know? Did any living thing, since the world began its spinning, know?
Imperceptibly, creeping like some opiate, the mystery of it occupied the Duke's fancy. He returned to the picture on the stair; to the girl in Oban. What was it that his blood had caught? What thing was it that set this woman above every other in the world? Why was it that the mere memory of her voice set the nerves under his skin to tingling? Why was it that a hunger for her spread through him, as though every fiber had a mouth that starved? Had he stood up to be shot against a wall, there, in the sun, he could not have answered.
He traveled for miles south along the river, in this autumn afternoon, idly, his gun under his arm, until the trail ended at the bend of the river, where the black waters swing about a moment, before plunging over a mile of rapids seaward through the mountains. Here the red Indian, whose trail he followed, used once to cross, swimming with a long stroke of his right arm, and holding his weapon over his head that the bowstring might be dry. A fir, uprooted by the winds, lay with its top buried in the pool, its brown body warm, mottled with the sun.
The Duke of Dorset sat down on this tree, his back against a limb. And Nature, that great enchantress, that subtle guardian of life, that divine fakir, squatting on her carpet in the sun, tempted him with pictures of vivid, intoxicating detail; whispered and suggested, stretching her lures, cunning as a spider, across the door posts of every sense. The leaves, falling on his face, were soft hands that touched him, the birds, laughing in the thickets, were a human voice that laughed, the rustle of their wings were skirts trailing on a carpet.