And in the fulness of time he approached the point of land from which he knew he could first see Doom's dark promontory if it were day. There his steps slowed. Somehow it seemed as if all his future fortune depended upon whether or not a light shone through the dark to greet him. Between him and the sea rolling in upon a spit of the land there was—of all things!—a herd of deer dimly to be witnessed running back and forward on the sand as in some confusion at his approach; at another time the thing should have struck him with amazement, but now he was too busy with his speculation whether Doom should gleam on him or not to study this phenomenon of the frosty winds. He made a bargain with himself: if the isle was black, that must mean his future fortune; if a light was there, however tiny, it was the star of happy omen, it was—it was—it was several things he dared not let himself think upon for fear of immediate disappointment.
For a minute he paused as if to gather his courage and then make a dash round the point.
Ventre Dieu! Blackness! His heart ached.
And then, as most men do in similar circumstances, he decided that the test was a preposterous one. Why, faith! should he relinquish hope of everything because—
What! the light was there. Like a fool he had misjudged the distance in the darkness and had been searching for it in the wrong place. It was so bright that it might be a star estrayed, a tiny star and venturesome, gone from the keeping of the maternal moon and wandered into the wood behind Doom to tangle in the hazel-boughs. A dear star! a very gem of stars! a star more precious than all the others in that clustered sky, because it was the light of Olivia's window. A plague on all the others with their twinkling search among the clouds for the little one lost! he wished it had been a darker night that he might have only this one visible.
By rights he should be weary and cold, and the day's events should trouble him; but to tell the truth, he was in a happy exaltation all the rest of the way. Sometimes the star of hope evaded him as he followed the bending path, trees interposing; he only ran the faster to get it into his vision again, and it was his beacon up to the very walls of Doom.
The castle took possession of the night.
How odd that he should have fancied that brave tower arrogant; it was tranced in the very air of friendliness and love—the fairy residence, the moated keep of all the sweet old tales his nurse was used to tell him when he was a child in Cam-mercy.
And there he had a grateful memory of the ringleted middle-aged lady who had alternately whipped and kissed him, and in his night's terrors soothed him with tales. “My faith!” said he, “thou didst not think thy Perrault's 'Contes des Fées' might, twenty years after, have so close an application to a woman and a tower in misty Albion.”
He walked deliberately across to the rock, went round the tower, stood a moment in the draggled arbour—the poor arbour of dead ideals. Doom, that once was child of the noisy wars, was dead as the Château d'Arques save for the light in its mistress's window. Poor old shell! and yet somehow he would not have had it otherwise.