Her boat was swayed close against the wall, in a sudden lurch, caused by a fiercer gust of wind and higher wave of the strong tide; the rushes entangled it; it grounded on the sand. There was no chance, she knew, of setting it afloat again without her leaving it to gain a footing on the land, and use her force to push it off into the current.
She leaped out without a moment's thought among the rushes, with her kirtle girt up close above her knees. She sank to her ankles in the sand, and stood to her waist in the water.
But she was almost as light and sure of foot as a moor-gull, when it lights upon the treacherous mosses of a bog; and standing on the soaked and shelving bank, she thrust herself with all her might against her boat, dislodged it, and pushed it out once more afloat.
She was about to wade to it and spring into it, before the stream had time to move it farther out, when an owl flew from the open window behind her. Unconsciously she turned her head to look whence the bird had come.
She saw the wide dark square of the opened casement; the gleam of a lamp within the cavern-like vastness of the vaulted hall. Instinctively she paused, and drew closer, and forgot the boat.
The stone sills of the seven windows were level with the topmost sprays of the tall reeds and the willowy underwood; they were, therefore, level with herself. She saw straight in; saw, so far as the pale uncertain fusion of moon and lamp rays showed them, the height and width of this legend haunted place; vaulted and pillared with timber and with stone; dim and lonely as a cathedral crypt; and with the night-birds flying to and fro in it, as in a ruin, seeking their nests in its rafters and in the capitals of its columns.
No fear, but a great awe fell upon her. She let the boat drift on its way unheeded; and stood there at gasp like a forest doe.
She had passed this grain tower with every day and night that she had gone down the river upon the errands of her taskmaster; but she had never looked within it once, holding the peasants' stories and terrors in the cold scorn of her intrepid courage.
Now, when she looked, she for the first time believed—believed that the dead lived and gathered there.
White, shadowy, countless shapes loomed through the gloom, all motionless, all noiseless, all beautiful, with the serene yet terrible loveliness of death.