BOOK FOURTH
THE LIGHTED HOUSE
CHAPTER I
THE HOSTESS PREPARING
Herrick lay in the long grass of the wooded lot, against the wall of the Hoover place. Already the night was velvet-black, and hot and thunder-scented as in summer. A million vibrations that were scarcely sound stirred with the myriad lives of leaf and blade in the dense silence. And his expectancy vibrated too, reaching for the end of a long chase. His slower train had followed on the very heels of that malign and radiant red-haired changeling, whose mysterious brew he was at last to taste for himself. Not this time in a little yellow cottage beside an open road, but in that great house, walled and guarded, deep and still in its own woodland, between the stone lions with their lifted wings and the mighty current of the tidal river! What he should do when he got there could be decided only by what he found. He had his revolver, and he scarcely knew whether to pray that he might, or that he might not, have need for it.
He remembered, tumbling over the wall from the inside, cascades of ivy, which he now hoped might give him a hand up the rough stone. But they tore away, one after the other, and sagged in his hold. He went on down the field, scouting in the darkness for some friendly tree; when he found one at last it was not so near the wall as he could have desired, and the first branch that seemed likely to bear him for any distance he judged to be about twenty feet above the ground. He crawled along this till its circumference seemed so slight he dared not trust another inch and peered into the pit. There was no way to make sure that the wall was there but to let go; he lowered himself the whole six feet of his length; let go; landed on the coping; by a miracle of balance maintained his equilibrium; and then, dropping cautiously to his knees, flattened himself along the edge. When you have dropped on to a wall which might or might not be there, it is nothing at all to drop on to the earth, which can not escape. He stood up, at last, within the Hoover grounds.
All was perfectly silent; the noise of his descent, which had seemed to crash like an earthquake, in reality had not waked a bird. He had now to make his way to the house through about a mile of perfect blackness; as a good beginning, he ran into a tree, and this rebuke of nature's seemed to put him in his place, and tell him to walk here like a spy, not like a combatant. He went on, but now with infinite caution.
This part of the ground was as little tended as a wild wood; then presently he came forth upon an old-fashioned garden, run wild, but still sending out sweet smells beneath his trampling feet; beds of white gillyflowers and fever-few and white banks of that odorous star-shaped bloom which opens to the night made a kind of paleness in the dark which perhaps he rather breathed and guessed than saw. It was an approach for a Romeo, and seemed to cast a kind of dream over his desperate and grimy business. He sped on to another little grove upon a rise of ground and coming to the top of the slope saw, far ahead of him through the trees, the shining of bright lights.
He could scarcely believe his eyes, for surely they would never dare to light the house. And then again he remembered how far and lonely that house stood, a mile and a half in from the road, and save through the lodge or from the river how hard to come at! If this was really their haunt it must have been so a long time; they must have grown used to it, like their own house. All the more chance, then, for his spying! Expectancy sprang higher. He kept on down the slope, this time at something of a reckless pace, and, at the bottom, plumped full into a pond.