CHAPTER XIII.

A SOUND.

All at once came to his ear through the night a strange something.

Whence or what it was he could not even conjecture. Was it a moan of

the river from below? Was it a lost music-tone that had wandered from

afar and grown faint? Was it one of those mysterious sounds he had

read of as born in the air itself, and not yet explained of science?

Was it the fluttered skirt of some angelic song of lamentation?--for if

the angels rejoice, they surely must lament! Or was it a stilled human

moaning? Was any wrong being done far down in the white-gleaming

meadows below, by the banks of the river whose platinum-glimmer he

could descry through the molten amethystine darkness of the starry

night?

Presently came a long-drawn musical moan: it must be the sound of some

muffled instrument! Verily night was the time for strange things!

Could sounds be begotten in the fir trees by the rays of the hot sun,

and born in the stillness of the following dark, as the light which the

diamond receives in the day glows out in the gloom? There are parents

and their progeny that never exist together!

Again the sound--hardly to be called sound! It resembled a vibration

of organ-pipe too slow and deep to affect the hearing; only this rather

seemed too high, as if only his soul heard it. He would steal softly

down the dumb stone-stair! Some creature might be in trouble and

needing help!

He crept back along the bartizan. The stair was dark as the very heart

of the night. He groped his way down. The spiral stair is the safest

of all: you cannot tumble far ere brought up by the inclosing cylinder.

Arrived at the bottom, and feeling about, he could not find the door to

the outer air which the butler had shown him; it was wall wherever his

hands felt. He could not find again the stair he had left; he could

not tell in what direction it lay.

He had got into a long windowless passage connecting two wings of the

house, and in this he was feeling his way, fearful of falling down some

stair or trap. He came at last to a door--low-browed like almost all

in the house. Opening it--was it a thinner darkness or the faintest

gleam of light he saw? And was that again the sound he had followed,

fainter and farther off than before--a downy wind-wafted plume from the

skirt of some stray harmony? At such a time of the night surely it was

strange! It must come from one who could not sleep, and was solacing

himself with sweet sounds, breathing a soul into the uncompanionable

silence! If so it was, he had no right to search farther! But how was

he to return? He dared hardly move, lest he should be found wandering

over the house in the dead of night like a thief, or one searching

after its secrets. He must sit down and wait for the morning: its

earliest light would perhaps enable him to find his way to his quarters!

Feeling about him a little, his foot struck against the step of a

stair. Examining it with his hands, he believed it the same he had

ascended in the morning: even in a great castle, could there be two

such royal stairs? He sat down upon it, and leaning his head on his

hands, composed himself to a patient waiting for the light.

Waiting pure is perhaps the hardest thing for flesh and blood to do

well. The relations of time to mind are very strange. Some of their

phenomena seem to prove that time is only of the mind--belonging to the

intellect as good and evil belong to the spirit. Anyhow, if it were

not for the clocks of the universe, one man would live a year, a

century, where another would live but a day. But the mere notion of

time, not to say the consciousness of _empty_ time, is fearful. It is

this empty time that the fool is always trying to kill: his effort

should be to fill it. Yet nothing but the living God can fill

it--though it be but the shape our existence takes to us. Only where

he is, emptiness is not. Eternity will be but an intense present to the

child with whom is the Father.

Such thoughts alighted, flitted, and passed, for the first few moments,

through the mind of Donal, as he sat half consciously waiting for the

dawn. It was thousands of miles away, over the great round of the

sunward-turning earth! His imagination woke, and began to picture the

great hunt of the shadows, fleeing before the arrows of the sun, over

the broad face of the mighty world--its mountains, seas, and plains in

turn confessing the light, and submitting to him who slays for them the

haunting demons of their dark. Then again the moments were the small

cogs on the wheels of time, whereby the dark castle in which he sat was

rushing ever towards the light: the cogs were caught and the wheels

turned swiftly, and the time and the darkness sped. He forgot the

labour of waiting. If now and then he fancied a tone through the

darkness, it was to his mind the music-march of the morning to his

rescue from the dungeon of the night.

But that was no musical tone which made the darkness shudder around

him! He sprang to his feet. It was a human groan--a groan as of one

in dire pain, the pain of a soul’s agony. It seemed to have descended

the stair to him. The next instant Donal was feeling his way

up--cautiously, as if on each succeeding step he might come against the

man who had groaned. Tales of haunted houses rushed into his memory.

What if he were but pursuing the groan of an actor in the past--a

creature the slave of his own conscious memory--a mere haunter of the

present which he could not influence--one without physical relation to

the embodied, save in the groans he could yet utter! But it was more

in awe than in fear that he went. Up and up he felt his way, all about

him as still as darkness and the night could make it. A ghostly cold

crept through his skin; it was drawn together as by a gently freezing

process; and there was a pulling at the muscles of his chest, as if his

mouth were being dragged open by a martingale.

As he felt his way along the wall, sweeping its great endless circle

round and round in spiral ascent, all at once his hand seemed to go

through it; he started and stopped. It was the door of the room into

which he had been shown to meet the earl! It stood wide open. A faint

glimmer came through the window from the star-filled sky. He stepped

just within the doorway. Was not that another glimmer on the

floor--from the back of the room--through a door he did not remember

having seen yesterday? There again was the groan, and nigh at hand!

Someone must be in sore need! He approached the door and looked

through. A lamp, nearly spent, hung from the ceiling of a small room

which might be an office or study, or a place where papers were kept.

It had the look of an antechamber, but that it could not be, for there

was but the one door!--In the dim light he descried a vague form

leaning up against one of the walls, as if listening to something

through it! As he gazed it grew plainer to him, and he saw a face, its

eyes staring wide, which yet seemed not to see him. It was the face of

the earl. Donal felt as if in the presence of the disembodied; he

stood fascinated, nor made attempt to retire or conceal himself. The

figure turned its face to the wall, put the palms of its hands against

it, and moved them up and down, and this way and that; then looked at

them, and began to rub them against each other.

Donal came to himself. He concluded it was a case of sleepwalking. He

had read that it was dangerous to wake the sleeper, but that he seldom

came to mischief when left alone, and was about to slip away as he had

come, when the faint sound of a far-off chord crept through the

silence. The earl again laid his ear to the wall. But there was only

silence. He went through the same dumb show as before, then turned as

if to leave the place. Donal turned also, and hurriedly felt his way

to the stair. Then first he was in danger of terror; for in stealing

through the darkness from one who could find his way without his eyes,

he seemed pursued by a creature not of this world. On the stair he

went down a step or two, then lingered, and heard the earl come on it

also. He crept close to the newel, leaving the great width of the

stair free, but the steps of the earl went upward. Donal descended,

sat down again at the bottom of the stair, and began again to wait. No

sound came to him through the rest of the night. The slow hours rolled

away, and the slow light drew nearer. Now and then he was on the point

of falling into a doze, but would suddenly start wide awake, listening

through a silence that seemed to fill the whole universe and deepen

around the castle.

At length he was aware that the darkness had, unobserved of him, grown

weaker--that the approach of the light was sickening it: the dayspring

was about to take hold of the ends of the earth that the wicked might

be shaken out of its lap. He sought the long passage by which he had

come, and felt his way to the other end: it would be safer to wait

there if he could get no farther. But somehow he came to the foot of

his own stair, and sped up as if it were the ladder of heaven. He

threw himself on his bed, fell fast asleep, and did not wake till the

sun was high.