Probably Ivan Kadilo, the bell-ringer, had gone to sleep in the church and had pulled the bell rope in his sleep, so long had he taken to sound the hour of midnight. To atone for his neglect, this last tug was so violent that the miller actually jumped as the sound came rolling over the hill, over his head, across the river, across the wood, and away over the distant fields through which wound the road to the city.
“Every one is asleep now,” the miller thought, and something gripped his heart. “Every one is asleep where he wants to be; all but the Jews crowded weeping into their churches, and I, who am standing here by my mill-pond like a lost soul, thinking wicked thoughts.”
And everything seemed very strange to him.
“I hear the sound of the bell dying away over the fields,” thought he, “and I feel as if something invisible were running, moaning, through the country. I see the woods beyond the river drenched with dew and shining in the moonlight, and I begin to wonder why they should be covered with frost on a summer’s night. And when I remember that my uncle was drowned in that pond, and how glad I was that it happened, I seem to lose heart entirely. I don’t know whether to go down to the mill or to stay where I am.”
“Gavrilo! Hey, Gavrilo!” he shouted at last. “There now! The mill is empty, and that scamp has made off to the village again after the girls.”
Philip stepped out into a bright spot of moonlight on the dam, and stood listening to the water trickling through the sluices. It seemed to him to be stealing out of the pond and creeping toward the mill-wheels.
“I had better go to bed,” he thought. “But I’ll see that everything is all right first.”
The moon had long since climbed to the zenith, and was looking down into the water. The miller wondered that the little river should be deep enough to hold the moon, and the dark blue sky with all its stars, and the little black cloudlet that was flying along all alone like a bit of down from the direction of the city.
But as his eyes were already half blind with sleep he did not wonder long. Having opened the outer door of the mill and bolted it again from the inside so that he should hear his reprobate workman when he came home, he lay down to sleep.
“Hallo, get up, Philip!” he suddenly thought to himself, and he jumped out of bed in the darkness as if some one had hit him with an axe. “I forgot that that little cloud was the same one the Jew’s servant and I saw flying toward the city, and wondered as we watched it how it could move without wind. There isn’t much wind now, and what there is isn’t coming from that quarter. Wait a minute, Philip, there’s something queer about this!”