That was, indeed, for them a strange home-going. From the first there was something dreamlike, unreal, about that southward flight; in the long sail across Hebrid seas, calm as glass until the south headlands of Mull were passed, and then storm-swept; in the rapid journey across Scotland and through England; and in the recrossing of that narrow sea which had once seemed to them a gulf of ultimate division.
But when once more they saw the grotesque bulbous spire of Ploumaliou rising above the sand-dunes by which, from St. Malo, they approached the dear, familiar country, all this uncertainty went from them. With light hearts they realized it was indeed true; that they were free at last of a life for which they were now unfitted, and that the lost threads in the maze had been found.
By their own wish the home-coming was so private that none knew of it save the doctor, the Curé, the lawyer who accompanied them from Ploumaliou, and the old gardener and his wife. As they neared the château from the north, Alan and Ynys alighted from the dishevelled carriage which was the sole vehicle of which Ploumaliou could boast. M. Auriol could drive on alone; for themselves, they chose to reach their home by the dunes and scattered pines, and thence by the yew close behind the manor-house.
The day was windless and of a serene beauty. Ever since noon the few clouds, suspensive in the azure flood like islets of snow, had waned till they were faint and light as blown swan's-down, then filmy as vapor lifted against the sun, and at last were no more visible; there had been the same unfathomable depths of azure, through which the tides of light imperceptibly ebbed from the zenith. The sea, too, was of a vivid though motionless blue, save where luminous with a white sheen or wrought with violet shadows and straits of amethyst. Upon the land lay a golden peace. A richer glow involved the dunes, where the pine-shadows cast long, motionless blue shapes. As, hand in hand, Ynys and Alan moved athwart the pine glade whence they could pass at once either westward into the cypress alley or eastward through the yew close, they stopped instinctively. Beyond them rose the chimneys and gables of the House of Kerival, strangely still and remote, for all their familiar look. What a brief while ago it seemed since he and she had walked under these pines, wrought by the first ecstasy of their virginal love. Then, those who now lay quiet in the darkness of the earth were alive; Lois de Kerival, with her repressed, passionate heart still at last; the Marquis Tristran, with the young grass growing soft and green over his bitterness; Alasdair Carmichael, with the echo of the island waves stilled under the quiet bells of the little church which guarded the grave-yard of St. Blaise; and Annaik—poor lost waif of beautiful womanhood, submerged forever in the green woods she loved so well, and sleeping so sound a sleep at last in an unmarked hollow beneath an ancient tree in some obscure glade or alley.
A shadow was in Alan's eyes—a deeper shadow than that caused by thought of the dead who lay heedless and listless, at once so near and such depths away—a deeper shadow than that cast by memory of the crime which overlay the past.
As his eyes wandered to the cypress alley, his heart knew again a pain almost beyond endurance; a pain that only the peace of Rona had translated into a strong acquiescence in the irrevocable past—a pain become less haunting under the stress of all which had happened in connection with the Herdsman, till it knew a bitter resurrection when Alan came to read of the tragic fate of the woman who had loved him.
Through some wayward impulse Ynys abruptly asked him to go with her through the cypress alley, so that they should approach the château from the forest.
Silently, and with downcast eyes, he walked by her side, his hand still in hers. But his thoughts were with the dead woman, on the bitter hazard of love, and on what lay, forever secret, between Annaik and himself. And as he communed with himself, in an austere pain of remembrance, he came to see more and more clearly that in some strange way the Herdsman episode, with all involved therein, was no arbitrary chance in the maze of life, but a definite working out of destiny. None could ever know what Annaik had foretold, had known, on that terrible night when the silence of the moonlit peace was continuously rent by the savage screams of the peacocks; nor could any other than himself discern, against the dark tapestries of what veiled his inner life, the weaving of an inextricable web.
It was difficult for him to believe that she was dead—Annaik, who had always been so radiantly, superbly alive. Now there was dust upon that wonderful bronze hair; darkness upon those lambent eyes; no swift pulse beating in the red tide in the veins; a frost against the heart. What a burden it had carried, poor heart! "Oh, Annaik, Annaik!" he muttered below his breath, "what a hard wayfaring because of a passion crucified upon the bitter tree of despair; what a fierce, silent, unwavering tyranny over the rebellious voices crying unceasingly from every nerve, or swept this way and that on every stormy tide of blood."