When the day darkens,
When dusk grows light,
When the dew is falling,
When Silence dreams ...
I hear a wind
Calling, calling
By day and by night.
What is the wind
That I hear calling
By day and by night,
The crying of wind?
When the day darkens,
When dusk grows light,
When the dew is falling?
The Will rose and moved towards the child. No one was there, but he saw that a wind-eddy blew about the altar, for a little cloud of rose-leaves swirled above it. As in a dream he heard a voice, faint and sweet:—
Out of the Palace
Of Silence and Dreams
My voice is falling
From height to height:
I am the Wind
Calling, calling
By day and by night.
The red flame waned and was no more. Above the altar a white flame, pure as an opal burning in moonfire, rose for a moment, and in a moment was mysteriously gathered into the darkness.
Startled, the Will stood moveless in the obscurity. Were these symbols of the end—the red flame and the white ... the Body and the Soul?
Then he remembered the ancient wisdom of the Gael, and went out of the Forest Chapel and passed into the woods. He put his lips to the earth, and lifted a green leaf to his brow, and held a branch to his ear: and because he was no longer heavy with the sweet clay of mortality, though yet of the human clan, he heard that which we do not hear, and saw that which we do not see, and knew that which we do not know. All the green life was his. In that new world he saw the lives of trees, now pale green, now of woodsmoke blue, now of amethyst: the grey lives of stone: breaths of the grass and reed: creatures of the air, delicate and wild as fawns, or swift and fierce and terrible, tigers of that undiscovered wilderness, with birds almost invisible but for their luminous wings, their opalescent crests.
With these and the familiar natural life, with every bird and beast kindred and knowing him kin, he lived till the dawn, and from the dawn till sunrise, and from sunrise till noon. At noon he slept. When he woke he saw that he had wandered far, and was glad when he came to a woodlander's cottage. Here a woman gave him milk and bread, but she was dumb, and he could learn nothing from her. She showed him a way which he followed; and by that high upland path, before sundown, he came again upon the Forest Chapel, and saw that it stood on a spur of blue hills.
Were it not for a great and startling weakness that had suddenly come upon him, he would have gone in search of his lost comrade. While he lay with his back against a tree, vaguely wondering what ill had come upon him, he heard a sound of wheels. Soon after a rough cart was driven rapidly towards the Forest Chapel, but when the countryman saw him he reined in abruptly, as though at once recognising one whom he had set out to seek. "Your friend is dying," he said; "come at once if you want to see him again. He sent me to look for you."