"But that matters little, if she will not marry me!" the young man had urged.
"My daughter is my daughter, De Morvan. I cannot compel her to marry you. I know her well enough to be sure that she would ignore any command of this kind. But women are fools; and one can get them to do what one wants, in one way if not in another. Let her be a while."
"But the betrothal!"
"Let it stand. But do not press it. Indeed, go away for a year. You are heir to your mother's estates in Touraine. Go there, work, learn all you can. Meanwhile, write occasionally to Ynys. Do not address her as your betrothed, but at the same time let her see that it is the lover who writes. Then, after a few months, confide that your absence is due solely to her, that you cannot live without her; and that, after a vain exile, you write to ask if you may come and see her. They are all the same. It is the same thing with my mares, for which Kerival is so famous. Some are wild, some are docile, some skittish, some vicious, some good, a few flawless – but… Well, they are all mares. One knows. A mare is not a sphinx. These complexities of which we hear so much, what are they? Spindrift. The sea is simply the sea, all the same. The tide ebbs, though the poets reverse nature. Ebb and flow, the lifting wind, the lifted wave; we know the way of it all. It has its mystery, its beauty; but we don't really expect to see a nereid in the hollow of the wave, or to catch the echo of a triton in the call of the wind. As for Venus Anadyomene, the foam of which she was made is the froth in poets' brains. Believe me, Annaik, my friend, women are simply women; creatures not yet wholly tamed, but tractable in the main, delightful, valuable often, but certainly not worth the tribute of passion and pain they obtain from foolish men like yourself."
With this worldly wisdom Andrik de Morvan had gone home, unconvinced. He loved Ynys; and sophistries were an ineffectual balm.
But as for Ynys, she had long made up her mind. Betrothal or no betrothal, she belonged now only to one man, and that man, Alan de Kerival. She was his and his alone, by every natural right. How could she help the accident by which she had cared for Andrik before she loved Alan? Now, indeed, it would be sacrilege to be other than wholly Alan's. Was her heart not his, and her life with her heart, and with both her deathless devotion?
Alan, she knew, trusted her absolutely. Before he went back to Paris, after their love was no longer a secret, he had never once asked her to forfeit any thing of her intimacy with Andrik, nor had he even urged the open cancelling of the betrothal. But she was well aware his own absolute loyalty involved for him a like loyalty from her; and she knew that forgiveness does not belong to those natures which stake all upon a single die.
And so the matter stood thus still. Ynys and Andrik de Morvan were nominally betrothed; and not only the Marquis and the Marquise de Kerival, but Andrik himself, looked upon the bond as absolute.
Perhaps Lois de Kerival was not without some suspicion as to how matters were between the betrothed pair. Certainly she knew that Ynys was not one who would give up any real or imagined happiness because of a conventional arrangement or on account of any conventional duty.
In Alan, Ynys found all that he found in her. When she looked at him, she wondered how she could ever have dreamed of Andrik as a lover, for Alan was all that Andrik was not. How proud and glad she felt because of his great height and strength, his vivid features with their gray-blue eyes and spirituel expression, his wavy brown hair, a very type of youthful and beautiful manhood! Still more she revered and loved the inner Alan whom she knew so well, and recognized with a proud humility that this lover of hers, whom the great Daniel Darc had spoken of as a man of genius, was not only her knight, but her comrade, her mate, her ideal.
Often the peasants of Kerival had speculated if the young seigneur would join hands with her or with Annaik. Some hoped the one, some the other; but those who knew Alan otherwise than merely by sight felt certain that Ynys was the future bride.
"They are made for each other," old Jeanne Mael, the village authority, was wont to exclaim; "and the good God will bring them together soon or late. 'Tis a fair, sweet couple they are; none so handsome anywhere. That tall, dark lass will be a good mother when her hour comes; an' the child o' him an' her should be the bonniest in the whole wide world."
With that all who saw them together agreed.
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.
While the moon slowly lifted from branch to branch a transient stir of life came into the forest.
Here and there he heard low cries, sometimes breaking into abrupt eddies of arrested song; thrushes, he knew, ever swift to slide their music out against any tide of light. Once or twice a blackcap, in one of the beeches near the open, sang so poignantly a brief strain that he thought it that of a nightingale. Later, in an oak glade, he heard the unmistakable song itself.
The sea sound came hollowly under the boughs like a spent billow. Instinctively he turned that way, and so crossed a wide glade that opened on the cypress alley to the west of the château.
Just as he emerged upon this glade he thought he saw a stooping figure glide swiftly athwart the northern end of it and disappear among the cypresses. Startled, he stood still.
No one stirred. Nothing moved. He could hear no sound save the faint sighing of the wind-eddy among the pines, the dull rhythmic beat of the sea falling heavily upon the sands.
"It must have been a delusion," he muttered. Yet, for the moment, he had felt certain that the crouching figure of a man had moved swiftly out of the shadow of the solitary wide-spreading thorn he knew so well, and had disappeared into the darker shadow of the cypress alley.
After all, what did it matter? It could only be some poor fellow poaching. With a smile, Alan remembered how often he had sinned likewise. He would listen, however, and give the man a fright, for he knew that Tristran de Kerival was stern in his resentment against poachers, partly because he was liberal in certain woodland-freedom he granted, on the sole condition that none of the peasants ever came within the home domain.
Soon, however, he was convinced that he was mistaken. Deep silence prevailed everywhere. Almost, he fancied, he could hear the soft fall of the dew. A low whirring sound showed that a night-jar had already begun his summer wooing. Now that, as he knew from Ynys, the cuckoo was come, and that the swallows had suddenly multiplied from a score of pioneers into a battalion of ever-flying darts; now that he had listened to the nightingales calling through the moonlit woods and had heard the love-note of the night-jar, the hot weather must be come at last – that glorious tide of golden life which flows from April to June and makes them the joy of the world.
Slowly he walked across the glade. At the old thorn he stopped, and leaned a while against its rugged, twisted bole, recalling incident after incident associated with it.
It was strangely restful there. Around him was the quiet sea of moonlight; yonder, behind the cypresses and the pine-crowned dunes, was the quiet sea of moving waters; yet, in the one, there was scarce less of silence than in the other. Ah! he remembered abruptly, on just such a night, years ago, he and Annaik had stood long there, hand in hand, listening to a nightingale. What a strange girl she was, even then! Well he recalled how, at the end of the song and when the little brown singer had slipped from its bough, like a stone slung from a sling, Annaik had laughed, though he knew not at what, and had all at once unfastened her hair, and let its tawny bronze-red mass fall about her shoulders. She was so beautiful and wild that he had clasped her in his arms, and had kissed her again and again. And Annaik … oh, he remembered, half shyly, half exultantly … she had laughed again, but more low, and had tied the long drifts of her hair around his neck like a blood-red scarf.
It gave him a strange emotion to recall all this. Did Annaik also think of it ever, he wondered? Then, too, had they not promised somewhat to each other? Yes … Annaik had said: "One night we shall come here again, and then, if you do not love me as much as you do now, I shall strangle you with my hair: and if you love me more we shall go away into the forest, and never return, or not for long, long; but if you do not love me at all, then you are to tell me so, and I will – "
"What?" he had asked, when she stopped abruptly.
At that, however, she had said no more as to what was in her mind, but had asked him to carve upon the thorn the "A" of her name and the "A" of his into a double "A." Yes, of course, he had done this. Where was it? he pondered. Surely midway on the southward side, for then as now the moonlight would be there.
With an eagerness of which he was conscious he slipped from where he leaned, and examined the bole of the tree. A heavy branch intervened. This he caught and withheld, and the light flooded upon the gnarled trunk.
With a start, Alan almost relinquished the branch. There, unmistakable, was a large carven "A," but not only was it the old double "A" made into a single letter, but clearly the change had been made quite recently, apparently within a few hours. Moreover, it was now linked to another letter. The legend ran: "A & J."
Puzzled, he looked close. There could be no mistake. The cutting was recent. The "J," indeed, might have been that moment done. Suddenly an idea flashed into his mind. He stooped and examined the mossed roots. Yes, there were the fragments. He took one and put it between his teeth; the wood was soft, and had the moisture of fibre recently severed.
Who was "J"? Alan pondered over every name he could think of. He knew no one whose baptismal name began thus, with the exception of Jervaise de Morvan, the brother of Andrik, and he was married and resident in distant Pondicherry. Otherwise there was but Jak Bourzak, the woodcutter – a bent, broken-down old man who could not have cut the letters for the good reason that he was unable to write and was so ignorant that, even in that remote region, he was called Jak the Stupid. Alan was still pondering over this when suddenly the stillness was broken by the loud screaming of peacocks.
Kerival was famous for these birds, of which the peasantry stood in superstitious awe. Indeed, a legend was current to the effect that Tristran de Kerival maintained those resplendent creatures because they were the souls of his ancestors, or such of them as before death had not been able to gain absolution for their sins. When they were heard crying harshly before rain or at sundown, or sometimes in the moonlight, the hearers shuddered. "The lost souls of Kerival" became a saying, and there were prophets here and there who foreboded ill for Tristran the Silent, or some one near and dear to him, whenever that strange clamor rang forth unexpectedly.
Alan himself was surprised, startled. The night was so still, no further storm was imminent, and the moon had been risen for some time. Possibly the peacocks had strolled into the cypress alley, to strut to and fro in the moonshine, as their wont was in their wooing days, and two of them had come into jealous dispute.
Still that continuous harsh tumult seemed rather to have the note of alarm than of quarrel. Alan walked to the seaward side of the thorn, but still kept within its shadow.
The noise was now not only clamant but startling. The savage screaming, like that of barbaric trumpets, filled the night.
Swiftly the listener crossed the glade, and was soon among the cypresses. There, while the dull thud of the falling seas was more than ever audible, the screams of the peacocks were so insistent that he had ears for these alone.
At the eastern end of the alley the glade broke away into scattered pines, and from these swelled a series of low dunes. Alan could see them clearly from where he stood, under the boughs of a huge yew, one of several that grew here and there among their solemn, columnar kin.
His gaze was upon this open space when, abruptly, he started. A tall, slim figure, coming from the shore, moved slowly inland across the dunes.
Who could this walker in the dark be? The shadowy Walker in the Night herself, mayhap; the dreaded soulless woman who wanders at dead of night through forests, or by desolate shores, or by the banks of the perilous marais.
Often he had heard of her. When any man met this woman, his fate depended on whether he saw her before she caught sight of him. If she saw him first, she had but to sing her wild, strange song, and he would have to go to her; and when he was before her two flames would come out of her eyes, and one flame would burn up his life as though it were dry tinder, and the other would wrap round his soul like a scarlet shawl, and she would take it and live with it in a cavern underground for a year and a day. And on that last day she would let it go, as a hare is let go a furlong beyond a greyhound. Then it would fly like a windy shadow from glade to glade or from dune to dune, in the vain hope to reach a wayside Calvary; but ever in vain. Sometimes the Holy Tree would almost be reached; then, with a gliding swiftness, like a flood racing down a valley, the Walker in the Night would be alongside the fugitive. Now and again unhappy night-farers – unhappy they, for sure, for never does weal remain with any one who hears what no human ear should hearken – would be startled by a sudden laughing in the darkness. This was when some such terrible chase had happened, and when the creature of the night had taken the captive soul, in the last moments of the last hour of the last day of its possible redemption, and rent it this way and that, as a hawk scatters the feathered fragments of its mutilated quarry.
Alan thought of this wild legend, and shuddered. Years ago he had been foolhardy enough to wish to meet the phantom, to see her before she saw him, and to put a spell upon her. For, if this were possible, he could compel her to whisper some of her secret lore, and she could give him spells to keep him scathless till old age.
But as, with fearful gaze, he stared at the figure which so leisurely moved toward the cypress alley, he was puzzled by some vague resemblance, by something familiar. The figure was that of a woman, unmistakably; and she moved as though she were in a dream.
But who could it be, there, in that lonely place, at that hour of the night? Who would venture or care…
In a flash all was clear. It was Annaik!
There was no room for doubt. He might have known her lithe walk, her wildwood grace, her peculiar carriage; but before recognition of these had come, he had caught a glimpse of her hair in the moonlight. It was like burnished brass, in that yellow shine. There was no other such hair in the world, he believed.
But … Annaik! What could she be doing there? How had she been able to leave the château; when had she stolen forth; where had she wandered; whither was she going; to what end?
These and other thoughts stormed through Alan's mind. Almost – he muttered below his breath – almost he would rather have seen the Walker in the Night.
As she drew nearer he could see her as clearly as though it were daylight. She appeared to be thinking deeply, and ever and again be murmuring disconnected phrases. His heart smote him when he saw her, twice, raise her arms and then wring her hands as if in sore straits of sorrow.
He did not stir. He would wait, he thought. It might add to Annaik's strange grief, if grief it were, to betray his presence. Again, was it possible that she was there to meet some one – to encounter the "J" whose initial was beside her own on the old thorn? How pale she was! he noticed. A few yards away her dress caught; she hesitated, slowly disengaged herself, but did not advance again. For the third time she wrung her hands.
What could it mean? Alan was about to move forward when he heard her voice:
"Oh, Alan, Alan, Alan!"
What … had she seen him? He flushed there in the shadow, and words rose to his lips. Then he was silent, for she spoke again:
"I hate her … I hate her … not for herself, no, no, no … but because she has taken you from me. Why does Ynys have you, all of you, when I have loved you all along? None of us knew any thing – none, till last Noël. Then we knew; only, neither you nor Ynys knew that I loved you as a soul in hell loves the memory of its earthly joy."
Strange words, there in that place, at that hour; but far stranger the passionless voice in which the passionate words were uttered. Bewildered, Alan leaned forward, intent. The words had waned to a whisper, but were now incoherent. Fragmentary phrases, irrelevant words, what could it all mean?
Suddenly an idea made him start. He moved slightly, so as to catch the full flood of a moonbeam as it fell on Annaik's face.
Yes, he was right. Her eyes were open, but were fixed in an unseeing stare. For the first time, too, he noted that she was clad simply in a long dressing-gown. Her feet were bare, and were glistening with the wet they had gathered; on her lustrous hair, nothing but the moonlight.
He had remembered. Both Annaik and Ynys had a tendency to somnambulism, a trait inherited from their father. It had been cured years ago, he had understood. But here – here was proof that Annaik at any rate was still subject to that mysterious malady of sleep.
That she was absolutely trance-bound he saw clearly. But what he should do – that puzzled, that bewildered him.
Slowly Annaik, after a brief hesitancy when he fancied she was about to awake, moved forward again.
She came so close that almost she brushed against him; would have done so, indeed, but that he was hidden from contact as well as from sight by the boughs of the yew, which on that side swept to the ground.
Alan put out his hand. Then he withdrew it. No, he thought, he would let her go unmolested, and, if possible, unawaked: but he would follow her, lest evil befell. She passed. His nerves thrilled. What was this strange emotion, that gave him a sensation almost as though he had seen his own wraith? But different … for, oh – he could not wait to think about that, he muttered.
He was about to stoop and emerge from the yew-boughs when he heard a sound which made him stop abruptly.
It was a step; of that he felt sure. And at hand, too. The next moment he was glad he had not disclosed himself, for a crouching figure stealthily followed Annaik.
Surely that was the same figure he had seen cross the glade, the figure that had slipped from the thorn?
If so, could it be the person who had cut the letter "J" on the bark of the tree? The man kept so much in the shadow that it was difficult to obtain a glimpse of his face. Alan waited. In a second or two he would have to pass the yew.
Just before the mysterious pursuer reached the old tree, he stopped. Alan furtively glanced to his left. He saw that Annaik had suddenly halted. She stood intent, as though listening. Possibly she had awaked. He saw her lips move. She spoke, or called something; what, he could not hear because of the intermittent screaming of the peacocks.
When he looked at the man in the shadow he started. A moonbeam had penetrated the obscurity, and the face was white against the black background of a cypress.
Alan recognized the man in a moment. It was Jud Kerbastiou, the forester. What … was it possible: could he be the "J" who had linked his initial with that of Annaik?
It was incredible. The man was not only a boor, but one with rather an ill repute. At any rate, he was known to be a poacher as well as a woodlander of the old Breton kind – men who would never live save in the forest, any more than a gypsy would become a clerk and live in a street.
It was said among the peasants of Kerival that his father, old Iouenn Kerbastiou, the charcoal burner, was an illegitimate brother of the late Marquis – so that Jud, or Judik, as he was generally called, was a blood-relation of the great folk at the château. Once this had been hinted to the Marquis Tristran. It was for the first and last time. Since then, Jud Kerbastiou had become more morose than ever, and was seldom seen among his fellows. When not with his infirm old father, at the hut in the woods that were to the eastward of the forest-hamlet of Ploumael, he was away in the densely wooded reaches to the south. Occasionally he was seen upon the slopes of the Black Hills, but this was only in winter, when he crossed over into Upper Brittany with a mule-train laden with cut fagots.
That he was prowling about the home domain of Kerival was itself ominous; but that in this stealthy manner he should be following Annaik was to Allan a matter of genuine alarm. Surely the man could mean no evil against one of the Big House, and one, too, so much admired, and in a certain way loved, as Annaik de Kerival? And yet, the stealthy movements of the peasant, his crouching gait, his patient dogging of her steps – and this, doubtless, ever since she had crossed the glade from the forest to the cypresses – all this had a menacing aspect.
At that moment the peacocks ceased their wild miaulling. Low and clear, Annaik's voice same thrillingly along the alley:
"Alan! Alan! Oh, Alan, darling, are you there?"
His heart beat. Then a flush sprang to his brow, as with sudden anger he heard Jud Kerbastiou reply, in a thick, muffled tone:
"Yes, yes, … and, and I love you, Annaik!"
Possibly the sleeper heard and understood. Even at that distance Alan saw the light upon her face, the light from within.
Judik the peasant slowly advanced. His stealthy tread was light as that of a fox. He stopped when he was within a yard of Annaik. "Annaik," he muttered hoarsely, "Annaik, it was I who was out among the beeches in front of the château while the storm was raging. Sure you must have known it; else, why would you come out? I love you, white woman. I am only a peasant … but I love you, Annaik de Kerival, I love you – I love you – I love you!"
Surely she was on the verge of waking! The color had come back to her white face, her lips moved, as though stirred by a breath from within. Her hands were clasped, and the fingers intertwisted restlessly.
Kerbastiou was so wrought that he did not hear steps behind him as Alan moved swiftly forward.
"Sure, you will be mine at last," the man cried hoarsely, "mine, and none to dispute … ay, and this very night, too."
Slowly Jud put out an arm. His hand almost touched that of Annaik. Suddenly he was seized from behind, and a hand was claspt firmly upon his mouth. He did not see who his unexpected assailant was, but he heard the whisper that was against his ear:
"If you make a sound, I will strangle you to death."
With a nod, he showed that he understood. "If I let go for the moment, will you come back under the trees here, where she cannot see or hear us?"
Another nod.
Alan relaxed his hold, but did not wholly relinquish his grip. Kerbastiou turned and looked at him.
"Oh, it's you!" he muttered, as he followed his assailant into the shadow some yards back.
"Yes, Judik Kerbastiou, it is I, Alan de Kerival."
"Well, what do you want?"
"What do I want? How dare you be so insolent, fellow? you, who have been following a defenceless woman!"
"What have you been doing?"
"I … oh, of course I have been following Mlle. Annaik also … but that was … that was … to protect her."
"And is it not possible I might follow her for the same reason?"
"It is not the same thing at all, Judik Kerbastiou, and you know it. In the first place you have no right to be here at all. In the next, I am Mlle. Annaik's cousin, and – "
"And I am her lover."
Alan stared at the man in sheer amaze. He spoke quietly and assuredly, nor seemed in the least degree perturbed.
"But … but … why, Kerbastiou, it is impossible!"
"What is impossible?"
"That Annaik could love you."
"I did not say she loved me. I said I was her lover."
"And you believe that you, a peasant, a man held in ill repute even among your fellow-peasants, a homeless woodlander, can gain the love of the daughter of your seigneur, of a woman nurtured as she has been?"
"You speak like a book, as the saying is, M. de Kerival." Judik uttered the words mockingly, and with raised voice. Annaik, who was still standing as one entranced, heard it: for she whispered again, "Alan! Alan! Alan!"
"Hush, man! she will hear. Listen, Judik, I don't want to speak harshly. You know me. Every one here does. You must be well aware that I am the last person to despise you or any man because you are poor and unfortunate. But you must see that such a love as this of yours is madness."
"All love is madness."
"Oh, yes; of course! But look you, Judik, what right have you to be here at all, in the home domain, in the dead of night?"
"You love Ynys de Kerival?"
"Yes … well, yes, I do love her; but what then? What is that to you?"
"Well, I love Annaik. I am here by the same right as you are."
"You forget. I am welcome. You come by stealth. Do you mean for a moment to say that you are here to meet Mlle. Annaik by appointment?"
The man was silent.
"Judik Kerbastiou!"
"Yes?"
"You are a coward. You followed this woman whom you say you love with intent to rob her."
"You are a fool, Alan de Kerival."
Alan raised his arm. Then, ashamed, he let it fall.