[CHAPTER V]
THE WALKER IN THE NIGHT
It was an hour from midnight when Alan rose, opened a window, and looked out. The storm was over. He could see the stars glistening like silver fruit among the upper branches of the elms. Behind the great cypress known as the Fate of Kerival there was a golden radiance, as though a disk of radiant bronze were being slowly wheeled round and round, invisible itself but casting a quivering gleam upon the fibrous undersides of the cypress spires. Soon the moon would lift upward, and her paling gold become foam-white along the wide reaches of the forest.
The wind had suddenly fallen. In this abrupt lapse into silence there was something mysterious. After so much violence, after that wild, tempestuous cry, such stillness! There was no more than a faint rustling sound, as though invisible feet were stealthily flying along the pathway of the upper boughs and through the dim defiles in the dense coverts of oak and beech in the very heart of the woods. Only, from hitherward of the unseen dunes floated a melancholy, sighing refrain, the echo of the eddying sea-breath among the pines. Beyond the last sands, the deep, hollow boom of the sea itself.
To stay indoors seemed to Alan a wanton forfeiture of beauty. The fragrance of the forest intoxicated him. Spring was come, indeed. This wild storm had ruined nothing, for at its fiercest it had swept overhead; and on the morrow the virginal green world would be more beautiful than ever. Everywhere the green fire of spring would be litten anew. A green flame would pass from meadow to hedgerow, from hedgerow to the tangled thickets of bramble and dog-rose, from the underwoods to the inmost forest glades. Everywhere song would be to the birds, everywhere young life would pulse, everywhere the rhythm of a new rapture would run rejoicing. The miracle of spring would be accomplished in the sight of all men, of all birds and beasts, of all green life. Each, in its kind, would have a swifter throb in the red blood or the vivid sap.
No, he could not wait. No, Alan added to himself with a smile, not even though to sleep in the House of Kerival was to be beneath the same roof as Ynys—to be but a few yards, a passage, a corridor away. Ah! for sure, he could dream his dream as well out there among the gleaming boughs, in the golden sheen of the moon, under the stars. Was there not the silence for deep peace, and the voice of the unseen sea for echo to the deep tides of love which surged obscurely in his heart? Yes, he would go out to that beautiful redemption of the night. How often, in fevered Paris, he had known that healing, either when his gaze was held by the quiet stars, as he kept his hours-long vigil, or when he escaped westward along the banks of the Seine, and could wander undisturbed across grassy spaces or under shadowy boughs!
In the great hall of the Manor he found white-haired Matieu asleep in his wicker chair. The old man silently opened the heavy oaken door, and, with a smile which somewhat perplexed Alan, bowed to him as he passed forth.
Could it be a space only of a few hours that divided him from his recent arrival, he wondered. The forest was no longer the same. Then it was swept by the wind, lashed by the rains, and was everywhere tortured into a tempestuous music. Now it was so still, save for a ceaseless faint dripping from wet leaves and the conduits of a myriad sprays and branches, that he could hear the occasional shaking of the wings of hidden birds, ruffling out their plumage because of the moonlit quietudes that were come again.
And then, too, he had seen Ynys; had held her hand in his; had looked in her beautiful, hazel-green eyes, dusky and wonderful as a starlit gloaming because of the depth of her dear love; had pressed his lips to hers, and felt the throbbing of her heart against his own. There, in the forest-edge, it was difficult to realize all this. It would be time to turn soon, to walk back along the sycamore-margined Seine embankment, to reach the Tour de l'Ile and be at his post in the observatory again. Then he glanced backward, and saw a red light shining from the room where the Marquis de Kerival sat up late night after night, and he wondered if Ynys were still there, or if she were now in her room and asleep, or if she lay in a waking dream.
For a time he stared at this beacon. Then, troubled by many thoughts, but most by his love, he moved slowly into one of the beech avenues which radiated from the fantastic mediæval sun-dial at the end of the tulip garden in front of the château.