Son of the Wind/Chapter 13
CHAPTER XIII
THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT
HE went quickly forward and pushed the curtain wide. Down in the angle of black cast by the outside stair, the figure of Blanche Rader was standing. Her body emerged from shadow into moonlight like a flower to the surface of water. Knees and the sweep of skirts were hidden. Shoulders and arms shone clear. The uncovered throat, and the face in its dark wreath of hair were like silver. She was leaning a little back, with limber waist, hands clasped behind her head, looking up. The mischief of middle night was in her face, subtle and scarcely smiling.
Grasping the window-frame in both hands, as if by such means he could keep the sight before him, the skeptic gazed. His heart, which had been full of her, might have prompted his eyes to summon the vision. It was but the flower of the time, the proper center of this pale flood of beauty, far too perfectly in tune with his thoughts to be real. His doubts must have been thick in his face, for suddenly she laughed. He saw the gleam of white teeth and light dancing in shadowed eyes, but heard not a sound. She skipped backward a few paces, stretched her hands toward the window, drew them back toward herself, fingers pointing to her bosom; flung them wide, fingers pointing around the clearing. This language of gesture, spirited and wayward, declared the actual woman. If anything were needed to reassure him beyond doubt it was the stamped foot and the violently shaken head by which she still commanded his presence at the window, when he would have left it for the outer door. Once more pointing at herself, she showed him with stroking gestures how she wore a coat, a queer little brown thing, a dryad garment, pale as the old bark of a tree. The air was mild, warm, mocking such a precaution; but a coat, or a thousand coats! if that was all she imposed to reach her!
He put on outer garments with a mind in abeyance. His senses thought, and were inspired. Opening the door the breath of night rushed upon his face to welcome him, sweet and unexpected as the woman's seeking him. From behind the wire screens it had looked as a picture. Now it was intimate, and whispered of actual possibilities. The voice of the pines flowed all round him, murmuring like a stream underground. He looked over the edge of the little balcony. No form, no face, either of woman or spirit. Nothing stirred in the clearing, nor in the angle made by the outside stair. The black likeness of it which the moon flung upon the ground, was as deep and opaque as any well; but even water shows faintly the forms beneath it. He leaned down over the rail and spoke her name under his breath. Not a sound replied. Feeling bewitched he descended the stair. Reaching the foot of it, immediately his ringers were grasped by a cool palm and he was drawn into the shadow.
Plunged into darkness with her he could see her. Her eyes looked black as the sky and radiant with excitement. The moon had taken the color from her lips. They were pale as an elf's. She took him by both arms and held, him off from her, looking at him up and down with a bright enigmatic gaze; but whether it demanded to know of him if he was indeed the greatest of men in the world, or whether it only spoke to him of the mystery of night, or some mystery beyond the night, it was impossible to tell. She laid a forbidding finger on his mouth when he would have kissed her. He tried to clasp her, but slippery as quicksilver she retreated before him.
"Come—this way," she murmured, and pulled him after her.
Half running he followed, keeping close under the piazza rail where the only shadow extended was a narrow band like a ribbon, past the steps where the first night she appeared to him as an arm extended out of darkness, and round the corner of the old wing, coming out before the front of the greater house.
"Where are we going?" he whispered.
"Sh-h-h!" She clung to the wall, holding them both still, listening. It was only the owl that had spoken. She put her lips close to Carron's ear. "Follow me around the edge of the clearing. Do exactly as I do. Don't speak."
The hotel with all its windows looked blank and dead as the face of a rock. It buttressed them from the live part of the house. In its shelter she ran fearlessly, but with remarkably light noiseless steps, and slipped into the trees on the left side of the drive. Here he had ado to keep her in sight. Now the white back of a neck gleamed, now a hand shone, laid an instant against a tree trunk; but chiefly he tracked her as an animated shadow gliding rapidly among shadows that were still, and leaving a waving of branches in its wake. She slid down the bank with a cascading of earth into the road just at the point where it turned from the clearing to descend the hill; and they stood together in the same place where Carron and Ferrier had stood that morning.
"What an awful lot of noise you make!" she whispered.
"Sound carries in this air."
"I can't help it, I'm not a feather. If you would only keep still a minute—"
She flitted just beyond his reach—seemed to be there already without having run away.
"Look over there," she said, pointing downward through the trees. "That way you will see the moon."
The moon! What was the moon to him, unless the reflection of her? What had the whole earth been to her only yesterday but a place in which to stand and be embraced? Now she could look at a bright spot above a scallop of trees with eyes that had forgotten him. Yet, after they had swept the trees, the ground, the sky, they returned again, as to the center of a circle, to his face.
"Are you coming?"
"You mad woman, where are you taking us?" She answered with a pressure of the hand, and began to take dancing steps, as if what her eyes saw around here was music to her. She moved in front of him with darting motions, now to this side of the road, now to the other. House and clearing disappeared behind them. A fretwork of white and black streamed upon their faces. They passed the gate-posts that rose upon their progress like phantoms. The thought of the old spring well came to him. She was leading him there, perhaps; but past the place where the path turned off she went without a look toward it. As the descent grew sharper her dancing steps became a run. Not, it seemed, in apprehension of anything that might pursue, but wild with pleasure, like a child dashing out of an open door. They raced each other, swinging around turns, losing caution on the firm road, ceasing to think of feet, seeming to fly. Little creatures darted across their way. A fox dashing in front of them showed them round eyes of gold and left them laughing.
The fork of the road brought a momentary halt. There was more black here than light. The fancy he had had when he looked at the walls of his room had become real. They were together among a tracery of forest branches. Yet these things were never as they were imagined. She was not. He could not touch her. Her hand slipped from him like light or water.
"Won't they know we have gone?" he asked.
"Well, we will have gone," she answered, and laughed. The inconsequent, reckless note made him uneasy, yet it excited him. She made him feel as though there were no house anywhere, no brains to be flushed, nor hearts to be cold, whatever might become of the two in the hollow of the hills, in the night. She began to walk rapidly up the road, which stretched like a thin white wand between high walls of trees.
The frolic of the woodland deity seemed to have settled into an intense purpose. It was carrying her forward at a pace that did not slacken to the crest of the slope. Here they dipped over into a dimple of land. Upon the right, below the road, he saw the mossy roof he had noticed when he rode back from his adventure of the Sphinx. The wagon track which led downward looked clearer than it had by day. Without hesitation Blanche turned into it.
Carron halted, astonished. "Where are you going?"
She hung on her heel, and pointed on.
"Whose house is that?"
"Ferriers'." She had scarcely pronounced the word before she had turned and disappeared under the low hanging branches of the pines.
Mystified, angry, wondering what madness she had in her head, he ran after. She was in the dooryard before he could reach her. There was only a narrow space of earth some four feet broad between house and cañon, and the trees stood at its edge, reaching arms across it like a roof. The sagged, unpainted house front looked dark and disinhabited. Blanche made a warning gesture for silence, and began moving cautiously down the clearing, keeping close under the windows as she had when they had passed the hotel. Past the door, and past the corner of the house, and to the farther edge of the clearing. Here she turned, smiled, and touched Carron with propitiatory fingers. "He isn't there," she whispered. "He is in town for the night. I arranged it," and, without waiting for further explanation, stepped over a low ledge of rock as sharp as the edge of a table.
From here an empty, almost barren, stretch of hillside, scattered stones and wider scattered pines, extended downward to a solid mass of trees. Beyond these the dark heads of the Sugar Loafs stood against a bright sky. There was no time for amazement, scarcely time to think how to find footing, if he were to keep up with her. She kept a good three yards in front, stopping now and then to scan what lay below, but seeming never at a loss. She was aiming, it appeared, for the formidable black encampment in the cañon, and aiming for one spot in its impregnable front. It was austere and large enough to awe even a woodsman's eye, seeing it for the first time, but the girl approached it with the assurance of one treading known ground. She did not hesitate even when she stood on the verge of it. No break in the trees was visible, from beneath their feet, but a trail unwound like a clue, a white plummet dropped into the cañon.
"It's rather rough," she said and reached him her hand. She said it as she would have said "The back stairs are steep." They plunged, and were swallowed from each other's eyes.
He had started boldly as the leader, but presently imperceptibly it was she who drew him. He had the enchanting and perilous sensation of being led by an unseen presence. The well of darkness was without a gleam. Two senses bound her to him in oblivion: the sense of touch—five fingers told him she was there—and the ear which caught sound—a sound both of life and of mortality—the sound of feet stumbling and catching hold upon earth. Sometimes a sweep of branches, inhuman fingers, brushed his face. Presently she began to murmur to him, "Better slide here. Reach up and catch hold of the branches. Look out for the rocks there. Keep to the left side here."
The smell of the cañon rose to them, night dew upon leaf mold. Then came the rift in the trees, the ripple of silver, the stream of the moon where the stream of water flowed in spring. They had reached the bottom of the cañon. "Step on the stones," she advised, "the sand is boggy." He had plunged a leg in almost to the knee before he could stop himself; and, as he recovered footing, the cluck of the sand, the sensation of being pulled, brought up another moment under the beating sun at the foot of a cliff.
Across the ford they were upon a more level way. On this side the rise of the land from the creek was gradual, and the trail, made by cattle to the water, was easy to follow. It drifted along at the foot of the hills, growing fainter as the trees grew thin. Fifteen minutes, and he heard a sound his ear recognized, often heard at such an hour of night—the trampling to and fro of feet, and tossing of branches as if restless bodies moved among them. "There are horses!" he said.
"Yes." The sentence fell unsurprised. She looked down significantly, and by the glance drew his attention to the fact that she wore her riding skirt. A few steps farther and swinging stirrups, bright eyes under forelocks, and glossy flanks appeared. He recognized Blanche's mustang, drooping like a stoic—but this other creature that was threshing among the pine leaves—could that be the chestnut—his mare? Early in the evening he had left her safe in stable. Here she stood in the wilderness, blanketed and tied to a dead pine. She flung up a startled head—and, seeing Carron, whinnied. He ran to her, felt her, and found her right enough, though very impatient, and turned his amazement on his companion. "How did she get here?"
"Down the trail. It was quite easy," Blanche answered. "I brought them before dark."
"Before dark! Good Lord—six hours ago!" He was horrified. "You shouldn't have left her here like that! Six hours! Suppose something had happened!"
"What could? She is covered, and there are no animals around that would attack a horse."
"I say you had no business to do it. It's risky, and we don't need them."
"But we do!"
His anger grew faint in astonishment. "Then why couldn't we have gone some other way?"
"We couldn't."
He stared. She, sensitive to the lightest disapproving word, was undisturbed by his heat, imperturbable, smiling. There was no being angry with this girl, whose bright enigmatic glance promised enchantment, if only he would risk a horse, and a wild way, and follow her. Many horses might be ridden to death for her, and more dangerous ways than this followed with her. His anger had sprung from the fixed passions of his life, the distinctive predeliction that was part of his character, but there was the other passion working in him to-night, the older more universal feeling which he shared in common with the trees and the moon. And this was the middle of the night, the hour she had called her own. They stood on the edge of it. Memories and half memories whispered in his mind—Blanche in the ancient shade of cedars speaking to him of the odd hours, moonrise at sunset, and yellow of dawn. He lifted her bodily into saddle and stood holding her with both hands.
She leaned down, resting hers on his shoulders. "What time is it?" she whispered.
The white silly little face of the timekeeper with busy hands measuring moments was to be their last glimpse of the common world that night. They had left the common world behind on the other side of the forest, and were riding out through the raveling fringe of trees into a naked and radiant plain. A ripple of light was beginning to flow among the pines. The moon, that had been so slow in revealing herself, was growing golden and bold above the heads of the "Sugar Loafs," until, as the riders left the last of the trees, she released her hold of the mountain tops and dared to float out into heaven. She stood high, and poured her radiance down straight. Far on the left it showed him a freckled rolling country, a cliff looking the height of a child's leap, and at its foot a streak no wider than a black ribbon. On the right the hills were near and sharp like an embattlement. Between these higher lands the level lay, filled with the moon. Moving in the thick atmosphere of light Carron felt it like a delicious element more volatile than water, more palpable than air, traveling in gradual ways that floated toward him. It was the floodtide of night, of which she had spoken, when the sky and earth have exchanged hues, the bright for the dark, and both are at the full pulse of life. Within Carron, too, tide stood at flood, the tide of spirit and blood that sweeps the will, and with it, makes a triple strength. The elation of being abroad at this hour, of seeing the bright edges of the earth on every side, feeling no limits to distance that might be traveled or wonders that might be born of such loveliness, were all an outer circle of emotion moving around the woman.
Close beside him, swaying a little in the saddle, poised on wiry waist, she appeared less like herself than some sketch of her caught by the lightning of a master's hand—all blacks and whites, her eyes two velvet splendors, her body outlined with a silver rim. Her lips were a little open as if to taste the sweetness of the wind, and she leaned into it away from him, giving herself to the bodiless caress. Her glance turned now upon the hills, now upward at the net of stars, as if she found these things as real as himself, as near to her and as awake to delight.
When she looked again at Carron it was with the expectation that he saw what was around them as she saw it; but the fine senses in her that made her feel kinship to inanimate things was dilated beyond his following. He felt the influence of the moon as a bath, but it seemed to have entered into her veins, making her more than woman. The creature whom he had thought petted and tamed beneath his hand, had sprung away from him. Her eyes, which had seen farther than his, reflected more, showed living thoughts undiscovered of him, alluring in their half concealment, seeming to peer at him from just beneath the surface. He wanted to conquer this untamed alien and make it his own. No thought prompted that this is a thing no one makes his own; since, conquered, it dies or changes into something else. But of change who would think, with the moon and the woman in his eyes? He was losing his exact sense of direction. He was unaware of how far the objects in the landscape had retreated from his conscious vision, until her hand upon his arm startled him. The fingers of fate could not have fallen more prompt and soft nor with more exigent pressure, telling him, "Wait; here's the time and the place."
He had halted before he looked. They had come up almost to the foot of the wall of hills. They must have approached it over the level in a gradually slanted course, for at no time had he seen it in front of him. He had been aware of it all the while upon his right as a darkish background to Blanche's head; but now the horses had stopped just beyond the long slides of scattered stone, and what had appeared as a continuous rampart separated itself into overlapping pyramids and columns; what at a little distance had worn a dark luster now looked lighter than the plain.
Immediately in front of him a great pale mass of rock rose, upcropping from a base of earth. The Sugar Loaf upon its right lapped behind it. The one on the left leaned upon it, overtopping it with tall cliff-like pinnacles, curved at the crest as if the winds of centuries had bent it. Between these two lay a thin edge of shadow, like a black knife. It encroached not at all upon the lighted front. From the stones at its feet to the crown the greater rock was all one high clear tone, higher and clearer than white. The moon above it lit it like a lantern held to a face. Gray, yellow, silver, who could say what color or if there were color at all? It had a luster at least, an extraordinary radiance. Just so, though it had no form suggesting human shape, yet it had a presence. A character was in it beyond that of its fellows, and as Carron gazed he became aware gradually of an untraceable expression, which was not the expression of a human face, nor of any human thought, but the ineffable look there is on insensate things, the look perhaps of Eternity.
To this power overshadowing them, which, should it topple, would crush them and be unaware, Blanche raised her eyes with a glance that hailed it. Following her gaze his remained fixed at the point where the crest of the rock jutted on the black sky. It was shaped like a helmet with wing-like pieces on either side. His glance rushed down the front of the thing. Looked at from beneath it was fore-shortened, the hollowed neck was hidden and the window which had led him with its eye of distance was lost. The whole form was flung out of proportion by nearness and too great reality. The strange transformation from the imagined to the actual had taken place, and the actual appeared less real than fancy.
It was not in this fashion he had expected to come to the feet of the Sphinx, nor thus he had thought to find her, hiding the loophole by which she had first led him. He began to wonder if the loophole had been of his imagining, or was the helmet shape he saw now a piece of his fancy.
Again Blanche's fingers touched his arm. She spoke to him in a low voice. "Keep well out until we are on the left of her. We can ride in there quite close. See that rock on the ground, the large one with the neck? We can tie the horses there."
It was this girl when he had pointed out the Sphinx from afar, who had surveyed it with unrecognizing eyes, and turning her back, passed it by like a clandestine friend in a crowd. Now she named it with the sex its aspect claimed, she moved around its feet as if the ground here were familiar to her. She went with the extraordinary rapidity he had noticed in her when she had an object in her mind, as if the quickest time was too long for getting at what she wanted. Before his astonishment could shape itself on his lips she was out of saddle and running across the interval of space, her shadow flying small beneath her feet. Her feet were climbing in the slide of stones before he had done fastening the horses.
Was she trying to get away from him? he wondered. The questions that had been on his tongue were forgotten. He needed his breath, all of it, if he meant to get abreast of her; and even with lungs like bellows and the feet of Mercury, reaching her seemed a forlorn hope. For, lighter than he, and possessed of some devil of agility, she made better headway. She had some yards start of him. Avalanches of soil slid from her nimble heels upon him, and avalanches sliding beneath his own feet carried him back a part of every advance he made, trying to catch at rooted substance to stop himself, but there was nothing rooted. Everything was swept back together. Whither, in such a fury of haste? The pyramid of earth, slippery though it was, was child's play. But at the top of it was planted the mountain of stone, a solid breadth without discernable place where foot could find passage. Yet she was approaching it without hesitation, as though she expected, when she reached it, a door in the blank front would open at a touch. He was scarcely halfway up the ascent when he saw her reach and catch the first firm outcropping. Edging cautiously up over treacherous-looking terraces, of mixed shale and earth, she rested her knee and both hands on a little projecting edge; with a spring, drew herself up; so paused, kneeling; and, being human, looked dark upon the breast of the Sphinx.
For a moment she remained balanced perilously against what appeared the sheer face of the rock. Her glance rose like a bird to the forehead of stone, than darted to the left past it. She made a motion. He could not tell whether she had slipped or purposely flung herself forward on hands and knees. In another moment she had vanished. She seemed to have melted into the face of the cliff. He shouted aloud in horror. Immediately her head and shoulders reappeared. She had neither been swallowed by an unexpected chasm nor perversely fled from him. She was waiting for him, peering at him over some invisible edge like a pale brown elf-woman, beckoning to him, as he drew nearer, offering him a helping hand which she could not compel him to take.
He drew himself up beside her, and found her sitting on a broad ledge of rock perhaps five feet deep. There had been no shadow to point it out to him from below, for the moon stood overhead; and no difference of color or perspective to trace it, since the moon, obliterating these, showed nothing but the fine line of the edge which his eye had missed. But now, upon it, he saw it was like a bench or a projecting collar, which seemed to extend all around the greater mass of the stone.
"Why did you do that?" he panted.
"Do what?"
"Rush up here ahead of me, before I could speak to you."
"Because I didn't want you to. You might have asked where we were going, and I didn't want to say—not then."
The words sank into his mind. He received the clear impression that she had some thought beyond the moon and the night; but it did not occur to him as a discovery, nor as being in any way strange, no more than it seemed strange to be poised here on a ledge between heaven and earth. He had come up to these things too gradually. He was, indeed, far off the ordinary tracks men follow, far, far away from the usual happenings of life. Yet once leap up to the high plane of the unusual and all lesser marvels upon it follow as a matter of course.
He had hardly time to get breath before she had risen to her feet. The ledge where they stood stopped on the right, cut off like a shelf. On the left it followed the sweep of the stone above, disappearing into the thin knife of shadow; but it was not in this direction Blanche looked, but up at the rock itself. Too near to take in the aspect of the face, the outline of the Sphinx nevertheless appeared undistorted. The side pieces jutted and overhung the thick column that was the throat; the shoulders swelled from this, a slippery, wicked-looking surface to travel for the bold soul who might aspire to clasp her neck. The overlapping wrinkles of stone had been wrought upon by centuries of weather. The forehead was worn by wind, the cheeks by rains, and across the breast a gash, as if the sword of the storm had cleft her. From the ledge on the right it extended upward to the left shoulder, and there disappeared in the shadow. Or was it only shadow? The space between the Sphinx's helmet and shoulder looked profound as the pit. Blanche hesitated, and looked at Carron. "You know there's only a chance we will see anything."
The meaning of the words were accepted in his mind as soon as they were spoken. "Let's go on," he answered. His voice sounded oddly to him. He felt wide-awake, but it was like being wide-awake in a dream. He saw her moving in front of him and had no fear that she might fall. She appeared to him more spirit of the rocks than woman. Some quality in his emotion had changed. Excitement was mounting from his senses into his brain. It seemed to him he had gone very far, farther even in his thoughts than his feet had climbed above solid earth. The sound of pebbles loosened and falling spoke to him of how far that was. He was leaving the thick golden radiance that dwelt in the plain. He felt it slip from his shoulders like water as he ascended into a thinner, keener, more crystal air. The moon was pinned tight in a purple sky. The atmosphere was motionless upon his cheek, until he came up over the Sphinx's shoulder. Here a great sigh breathed upon them out of that mouth of darkness. A sudden draft, a sharp drawn line where all that was known ended. They stood on the edge of the window of the Sphinx, and the short locks on his forehead were stirred by a wind from nowhere.
The rock closed in on three sides of them. It was strange to be thus pressed upon by walls after miles of a wide open, but it was not grim as he had anticipated. It was like dipping into black velvet. The footing was firm and only a little slanted. He went forward easily, keeping one hand on the solid rock. The wind blew steadily in his face, and it was no caverned air, but dry, chilly and smelling of forests. At first he could see nothing. Blanche was present only as an echo and the flutter of a skirt; but presently he began to distinguish the outline of her body, moving on in front of him, against a faintly bright distance; suddenly above his right shoulder shone a star. He felt a thrill at his heart. His eyes were ready for the long-fancied unimaginable sight. To peer at the edge of the unknown, the high sensation of the expectant soul! He felt a lightening of the air above him. His companion stopped. She was no longer in front of him, but beside him. In front of him was a sheet of deep blue hazed with white.
He saw neither what was above his head nor beneath his feet, but only what was in front of him, too far to reach yet not too far to be real, not painted with the colors of distance but still overhung by the glamour of it—the poetic and terrific spectacle of the great brood of mountains.
Their multiplying summits were all in piercing silver light. It ran in outline down their shoulders. On their ledges and divides shadows like wings were folded. The cañon's depth was one black shadow from side to side, the trees like black waves driving up the ravines. The arch of the sky above him was immense, the cañon was the converse hollow. The woven lines of summits binding the two stood stark in the radiance, frozen with silence. The trees, the cold white fire of the moon, the night-hawk, that divided the air with his wings shooting downward like a plummet, were all a part of one thing, one strength, one awful unconsciousness of strength. In the face of it the man's strength was faint. The sense of being human, of being vulnerable and mortal came over him. He stretched out his hand, unaware that he did so, and clasped the woman's. It responded with a tremulous pressure. But he scarcely felt it. He drew her toward him, yet hardly knew that she was there. The awe of what was around them had entered his blood. The beauty of it filled his eyes. The pagan in him trembled and worshiped.
At the first his ears had taken in only silence. But that dwelt high among peaks where his eyes had been fixed. Now he became aware of a sound rising from beneath so hoarse and faint that it made a greater loneliness. He looked down, and realized he was standing, not only the height of the Sphinx, but of the whole rolling plateau behind him. He had not realized how far above the other land this lay; but now he could look down upon the running backs of lesser hills, each outline painted by the moon. Over these he had looked into the great cañon, among these the river wandered and complained; and into these the Sphinx's pedestal descended. Carron could see the slide of the earth and the scattering trees beneath him. To a bird the distance had been no great matter, but for a man still in love with life there must be some other way than the smooth thirty feet of stone. No ledges here, once they were over the ledge of the shoulder; but this itself was broad and stretched out to the left where the Sphinx's neighbor crowded upon her. At a point here the two seemed knitted into one, and from the precipitous back of the one to the easy swell of the other's side was a step. The extraordinary path he was following, with splendors for the eye and terrors for the imagination was at every turn possible and easy for the feet.
They went down over long shallow terraces, for the spread of this eminence was slow as it neared the depth. The moon had sunk away until it stood. above the Sphinx's head. The great cañon sank behind the company of hills. In their black hollow a bright spot rippled like prismed glass. That would be the river the moon had caught leaping a rapid. Elsewhere it flowed unseen, and was heard as a monotone unvarying and incessant. It was strange to come down upon soft ground again, to feel it yield beneath his feet and see leaves above his head. He was traveling again on broad earth down an abrupt slope, his companion soft footing a pace in advance and threading rapidly among the trees. The sound of pouring water was still like a sound of the distance. He had no forewarning of the broken white which glimmered suddenly beyond the trunks of the pines. It was a line of boulders tossed up in a low irregular wall. This might be a branch from the bed of the greater stream that had been sucked dry by months of sun. Blanche pressed between the rocks or over them warily, looking back to point him a secure foothold evidently known to her, tried, and to be depended on. A creature in flight for her life could have made better use of the minutes. Coming over upon the other side above the channel he saw below him the thing he had not expected, the smooth dark surface of water gliding without a whisper, deep shrunken in its bed. At least a foot of the perpendicular wall made glassy smooth by the undercurrent was bare. Higher the rock projected, was irregular and hollowed into shallow caves. Above these the crevices of the boulders were swept full of dry twigs, leaves and grass, powdery and gray, and full of silt. Edging along cautiously, moving her feet carefully as a cat, she stopped and stooped, and gathering her skirts, crept into an opening in the rock.
It was one of those wave-worn caves sometimes to be found in the walls of mountain rivers, in spring covered by the water which now ran some four feet below. As he followed her into the black hole, sliding feet first, he could feel its sides rough and clean as coral; but earth had been loosely sprinkled over its surface, and dry moss, pulled up by the roots, was drawn about the entrance, and once they were both in she pulled it up in a heap, hiding half the opening, leaving room enough for their eyes to look out. The floor of the cave was almost level, so that as they lay stretched upon it, they could look out to the opposite bank, or down into the river. It ran languidly in long ripples. Where they lifted the moon caught just the edge; but a little way up stream, still in plain sight, the surface ruffled in silver over gravel, for here the boulders stopped for an interval, and a narrow spit of land pointed out into the stream. This went back to an open space a glistening white patch in front of the forest. One dead pine stood up out of it and made a point of shadow on the bright ground.
The smell of water and wet rock rose to his nostrils. A sharp air hovered above the stream.
"Are you cold?" Blanche murmured. Her lips were at his ear so that the words were not audible.
He shook his head.
"You are trembling."
Carron was not conscious of this, and did not believe it. His blood was aflame from heroic exercise. The air was scarcely cold enough for his hot face. His heart played like a drum on his ribs, the pulses in his wrists hammered, he felt the quick throb in his temples. His breath came short. He tried to fill his lungs. He stretched his feet to get a less cramped position, and a stone slipped in the bottom of the cave. He held his breath, fearful lest it go reverberating in the depths, frightening silence. Blanche laid her hand warningly on his arm. Silence, that large, sensitive, brittle depth inclosing them, they were both of a mind to keep absolute. It was so hollow it seemed that a stir would set it sounding to the far mountain tops; but everything that was abroad in it seemed to conspire to keep it whole. Not a twig cracked under any stealthy tread. All creatures that were abroad must be the cushion-footed—themselves respecters of noiselessness. Even the eye could discover no motion. The river might have been a snake stretched out asleep, the trees printed on the sky. The only thing that moved was the shadow of the dead pine, and that was like the hand of a clock too slow to be perceived in motion. He listened with distended senses. It seemed to him he could hear the movement of thoughts in his own brain, the flowing of the blood in his fingertips; but outside of himself not a sound. The air, sick for vibrations, was vibrating by its own emptiness. Like a gong, it assailed the senses in waves, at first beating in upon them from without. Then, as he stretched his ears to hear above it, the gong seemed to be within his head struck upon by his furious pulses, sending out a prolonged shrill ringing, so loud it seemed this sound in the ear of imagination would have drowned a thunderclap.
Not thunder, but a light faint noise at some distance made all the vibration cease. On the instant silence was as still as crystal to the real sound. It rang first as a single dull blow struck like a challenge among the mountains. Now it multiplied. It came intermittently, a rapid beating of the same hard muffled substance on the harder rock; now quiet, now repeated; faint at first, growing louder. Dead branches cracked, trampled over. Spaces of earth sounded like a drum beneath the tread. Again, among stones, the ringing was clear and sharp. To those proud feet silence was a thing to strike echoes from. The sound of the approach set the listeners' heart to its measure-rhythmic, wild, irregular, a roulade of liberty beaten out upon the earth. Carron was shaking like a man with a chill. His hands were cold. His throat, dry and stiff, seemed closing against breath. He had to clench his teeth to keep them from chattering; but the girl lay as still as moonlight, though she looked as pale, and her eyes were large with expectation of delight, as if she expected a rose to blossom under her sight, or a bird to fly to her out of heaven.
A rapid trot sounded just within the last fringe of pines, and a shadow ran out from the trees and rested, quivering, on the bright ground. There was a rustle among the pine branches, and the moon shone on a black forelock and pricked ears. The branches waved softly to and fro as the horse came pushing through. He paused at the upper edge of the clearing and lifted his head high. He looked large, and doubly large being alone. The state by which kings add to their stature increased his. He gave a slow trepid glance around the clearing, while his wide nostrils drank the wind. Over water and through moss and earth it came purely. There was no scent to startle delicate stretched nerves. He began to advance down the rocky floor at a gait a little faster than a walk. An undulating motion went through the whole body as if the hoofs trod air. The mane waved with it, the tail drifted like a plume. Carron could see the quick ripple of muscles under the satin skin. That was the back that had never felt weight, the neck like a bow that had never bent except at its own will. The white left foot which Carron had seen speeding in terror trod delicately as a girl's on the rocky slope. A star on the breast that had shone at the head of herds now shone solitary. The eyes that had been scarlet with fury were dark and bright and bent on the silver ripple of water as toward the face of a friend. He seemed to condescend to earth with those haughty graces with his own shadow, twisting his head sidewise, trifling with its liberty. Miles around him nothing moved that would not run from him, nothing but eagles, and these floated free, and kept an equal state.
At the lip of the water he paused once more, one more haughty earnest stare now up, now down the stream and his nostrils fluttered like black butterflies. Then, as meekly as if all the world were his friend, he stooped his head, stretched out his neck, shining while the mane blew in a veil against it, put muzzle in the current and drank.