He yawned, stretched his aching body on the clean dry litter, shut his hot and sandy eyes, seeing rings of green-blue fire. Oblivion descended on him. Pretense became reality. He sank into a very gulf of sleep.
Long after her comrade's heavy respiration had told her that he was wrapped in slumber, Juliette Bayard sat staring out into the deepening dusk. Insomnia born of nervous strain and mental shock claimed her as a victim. She was far more near to madness than Carolan had dreamed.
It was a night of chilly breathings from the northwest, and violent contrasts in light and shadow; a high bright moon making black silhouettes of hills and trees, and bottomless infernos of hollows and ravines. Gigantesque clouds up-piled monstrous ramparts on the southeast horizon, others topped these with the strangest sculpturesque shapes.... An iceberg with a veiled crouching figure on it; a mammoth with elevated trunk and great curved tusks, bellowing in dumb show; wrestling shapes of Titans prone or erect; lovely children playing in meadows of asphodel; vast winged shapes of genii with hidden faces, speeding across unthinkable distances of cold, crystal-blue atmosphere.
But the cloud-shape that most persistently recurred was that of a heavy-browed, mustached Colossus, who sometimes was helmed and cuirassed, and bestrode a monstrous horse of war. In other vaporous pictures he addressed great multitudes from a high rostrum, or from some fantastic hill-peak urged on rushing armies; or sometimes counseled a crowned figure that sat upon a high-placed throne.
Yet whatever the giant was, there was sure to be another figure, slender, weak, fragile, a mere vaporous wisp of mist. And the watcher had strange cognizance that this was the appointed Fate of Colossus, and that her constant presence was an augury of ill for him.
He walked amid trees in a wood, and his Fate dogged his footsteps, a pistol or poignard ready for her country's enemy.... He ate at a daïs-table in a banqueting hall—she served him a golden cup of wine iced and poisoned. ... He lay down to sleep on a lordly bed, the frail shape glided in with a torch and fired the curtains.... He dreamed of Power on the brink of a precipice, and his tiny Fate crept near unseen, and thrust him screaming down.
The moon had long southed, the cloud-shapes were growing vaguer, the eyes of the stars looked through their thinning veils. The wind had fallen, the silence was profound and awful. She shuddered, thinking of the battlefield....
What of de Bayard lying under his clay coverlet? What of the thousands of bodies buried in the newly-dug trenches? What of the myriads yet unburied, lying stark and awful under the canopy of Night?
Did they understand, the Dead, whose hand had really poured red life from them, and thrown them like empty, broken vessels abroad upon the trodden fields? Did they curse him with their stiff, silent lips, and point at him with their rigid fingers? Would they know, in Paradise or Purgatory, if anyone avenged them? In Hell they would be sure to know, because their murderer would be there....
"Ting...."