STORM
Yes, he was glad to leave Paris, although that home of lost
causes--thus designate in a far truer sense than is the fair city by
the Isis--had a spell for him. But not Paris, not even what, night
after night, he beheld from the Tour de l'Ile, held him under a spell
comparable with that which drew him back to the ancient land where his
heart was.
In truth, it was with relief at last that he saw the city recede from
his gaze, and merge into the green alleys north-westward. With a sigh
of content, he admitted that it was indeed well to escape from that
fevered life--a life that, to him, even in his lightest mood, seemed
far more phantasmal than that which formed the background to all his
thoughts and visions. Long before the cherry orchards above Rouen
came into view he realized how glad he was even to be away from the
bare, gaunt room where so many of his happiest hours had been spent;
that windy crow's-nest of a room at the top of the Tour de l'Ile,
whence nightly he had watched the procession of the stars, and nightly
had opened the dreamland of his imagination to an even more alluring
procession out of the past.
His one regret was in having to part from Daniel Darc, that strange
and impressive personality who had so fascinated him, and the spell
of whose sombre intellect, with its dauntless range and scope, had
startled the thought of Europe, and even given dreams to many to whom
all dreams had become the very Fata Morgana of human life.
Absorbed as he was, Daniel Darc realized that Alan was an astronomer
primarily because he was a poet rather than an astronomer by inevitable
bias. He saw clearly into the young man's mind, and certainly did not
resent that his favorite pupil loved to dwell with Merlin rather than
with Kepler, and that even Newton or his own master Arago had no such
influence over him as the far-off, nigh inaudible music of the harp of
Aneurin.
And, in truth, below all Alan's passion for science--of that science
which is at once the oldest, the noblest, and the most momentous;
the science of the innumerous concourse of dead, dying, and flaming
adolescent worlds, dust about the threshold of an unfathomable and
immeasurable universe, wherein this Earth of ours is no more than a
mere whirling grain of sand--below all this living devotion lay a
deeper passion still.
Truly, his soul must have lived a thousand years ago. In him, at least,
the old Celtic brain was reborn with a vivid intensity which none
guessed, and none except Ynys knew--if even she, for Alan himself only
vaguely surmised the extent and depth of this obsession. In heart and
brain that old world lived anew. Himself a poet, all that was fair and
tragically beautiful was forever undergoing in his mind a marvellous
transformation--a magical resurrection rather, wherein what was remote
and bygone, and crowned with oblivious dust, became alive again with
intense and beautiful life.
* * * * *
It did not harmonize ill with Alan's mood that, on the afternoon of the
day he left Rouen, great, bulbous storm-clouds soared out of the west
and cast a gloom upon the landscape.
That is a strange sophistry which registers passion according to its
nearness to the blithe weal symbolized in fair weather. Deep passion
instinctively moves toward the shadow rather than toward the golden
noons of light. Passion hears what love at the most dreams of; passion
sees what love mayhap dimly discerns in a glass darkly. A million of
our fellows are "in love" at any or every moment; and for these the
shadowy way is intolerable. But for the few, in whom love is, the eyes
are circumspect against the dark hour which comes when heart and brain
and blood are aflame with the paramount ecstasy of life.
Deep passion is always in love with death. The temperate solicitudes of
affection know not this perverse emotion, which is simply the darker
shadow inevitable to a deeper joy--as the profundity of an Alpine lake
is to be measured by the height of the remote summits which rise sheer
from its marge.
When Alan saw this gloom slowly absorb the sunlight, and heard below
the soft spring cadences of the wind the moan of coming tempest, his
melancholy lightened. Soon he would see the storm crushing through the
woods of Kerival; soon feel the fierce rain come sweeping inland from
Ploumaliou; soon hear, confusedly obscure, the noise of the Breton Sea
along the reef-set sands. Already he felt the lips of Ynys pressed
against his own.
* * * * *
The sound of the sea called through the dusk, now with the muffled
under roar of famished lions, now with a loud, continuous baying like
that of eager hounds.
Seaward, the deepening shadows passed intricately from wave to wave.
The bays and sheltered waters were full of a tumult as of baffled
flight, of fugitives jostling each other in a wild and fruitless
evasion. Along the interminable reach of the Dunes of Kerival the
sea's lips writhed and curled; while out of the heart of the turbulent
waste beyond issued a shrill, intermittent crying, followed by stifled
laughter. Ever and again tons of whirling water, meeting, disparted
with a hoarse thunder. This ever-growing and tempestuous violence was
reiterated in a myriad raucous, clamant voices along the sands and
among the reefs and rocks and weed-covered wave-hollowed crags.
Above the shore a ridge of tamarisk-fringed dune suspended, hanging
there dark and dishevelled, like a gigantic eyebrow on the forehead of
a sombre and mysterious being. Beyond this, again, lay a stretch of
barren moor, caught and claspt a mile away by a dark belt of pines,
amid which the incessant volume of the wind passed with a shrill
whistling. Further in among the trees were oases of a solemn silence,
filled only at intervals with a single flute-like wind-eddy, falling
there as the song of a child lost and baffled in a waste place.
Over and above the noise of the sea was a hoarse cry thridding it
as a flying shuttle in a gigantic loom. This was the wind, which
continuously swept from wave to wave--shrewd, salt, bitter with the
sterile breath of the wilderness whereon it roamed, crying and moaning,
baying, howling, insatiate.
The sea-fowl, congregating from afar, had swarmed inland. Their wailing
cries filled the spray-wet obscurities. The blackness that comes before
the deepest dark lay in the hollow of the great wings of the tempest.
Peace nowhere prevailed, for in those abysmal depths where the wind was
not even a whisper, there was listless gloom only, because no strife is
there, and no dream lives amid those silent apathies.
Neither upon the waters nor on the land was there sign of human life.
In that remote region, solitude was not a dream but a reality. An
ancient land, this loneliest corner of sea-washed Brittany; an ancient
land, with ever upon it the light of olden dreams, the gloom of
indefinable tragedy, the mystery of a destiny long ago begun and never
fulfilled.
Lost like a rock in a forest, a weather-worn, ivy-grown château stood
within sound, though not within sight, of this tempestuous sea. All
about it was the deep, sonorous echo of wind and wave, transmuted into
a myriad cries among the wailing pines and oaks and vast beeches of the
woods of Kerival. Wind and wave, too, made themselves audible amid the
gables and in the huge chimneys of the old manor-house; even in the
draughty corridors an echo of the sea could be heard.
The pathways of the forest were dank with sodden leaves, the _débris_
of autumn which the snows of winter had saved from the whirling gales
of January. Underneath the brushwood and the lower boughs these lay in
brown, clotted masses, emitting a fugitive, indefinite odor, as though
the ghost of a dead year passed in that damp and lifeless effluence.
But along the frontiers of the woods there was an eddying dust of
leaves and small twigs, and part at least of the indeterminate rumor
which filled the air was caused by this frail lapping as of innumerable
minute wings.
In one of those leaf-quiet alleys, shrouded in a black-green darkness
save where in one spot the gloom was illumined into a vivid brown,
because of a wandering beam of light from a turret in the château, a
man stood. The head was forwardly inclined, the whole figure intent as
a listening animal. He and his shadow were as those flowers of darkness
whose nocturnal bloom may be seen of none save in the shadowy land of
dream.
When for a moment the wind-wavered beam of light fell athwart his
face--so dark and wild that he might well have been taken for a
nameless creature of the woods--he moved.
With a sudden gesture he flung his arms above his head. His shadow
sprang to one side with fantastic speed, leaping like a diver into the
gulf of darkness.
"Annaik," he cried, "Annaik, Annaik!"
The moan of the wind out of the sea, the confused noise of the wind's
wings baffling through the woods; no other answer than these, no other
sound.
"Annaik, Annaik!"
There was pain as of a wounded beast in the harsh cry of this haunter
of the dark; but the next moment it was as though the lost shadow had
leapt back, for a darkness came about the man, and he lapsed into the
obscurity as a wave sinks into a wave.
But, later, out of the silence came a voice.
"Ah, Annaik!" it cried, "ah, Annaik, forsooth! It is Annaik of Kerival
you are, and I the dust upon the land of your fathers--but, by the
blood of Ronan, it is only a woman you are; and, if I had you here it
is a fall of my fist you would be having--aye, the stroke and the blow,
for all that I love you as I do, white woman, aye, and curse you and
yours for that loving!"
Then, once again, there was silence. Only the screeching of the
wind among the leaves and tortured branches; only the deep roar of
the tempest at the heart of the forest; only the thunder of the sea
throbbing pulse-like through the night. Nor when, a brief while later,
a white owl, swifter but not less silent than a drift of vapor, swooped
that way, was there living creature in that solitary place.
The red-yellow beam still turned into brown the black-green of that
windy alley; but the man, and the shadow of him, and the pain of the
beast that was in him, and the cry of the baffled soul, the cry that
none might know or even guess--of all this sorrow of the night, nothing
remained save the red light lifting and falling through the shadowy
hair of what the poets of old called The Dark Woman ... Night.
Only, who may know if, in that warmth and glow within the House of
Kerival, some sudden menace from the outside world of life did not
knock at the heart of Annaik, where she, tall and beautiful in her
cream-white youth and with her mass of tawny hair, stood by Ynys,
whose dusky loveliness was not less than her own--both radiant in the
fire-light, with laughter upon the lips and light within their eyes.
Oh, flame that burns where fires of home are lit! and oh, flame that
burns in the heart to whom life has not said, Awake! and oh, flame that
smoulders from death to life, and from life to death, in the dumb lives
of those to whom the primrose way is closed! Everywhere the burning
of the burning, the flame of the flame; pain and the shadow of pain,
joy and the rapt breath of joy, flame of the flame that, burning,
destroyeth not till the flame is no more!
* * * * *
It was the night of the home-coming of Alan. So long had Ynys and
Annaik looked forward to this hour, that now hardly could they believe
the witness of their eyes when with eager glances they scrutinized the
new-comer--their Alanik of old.
He stood before the great fire of logs. Upon his face the sharp,
damp breath of the storm still lingered, but in his eyes was a light
brighter than any dancing flame would cause, and in his blood a pulse
that leapt because of another reason than that swift ride through the
stormy woods of Kerival.
At the red and stormy break of that day Ynys had awaked with a song
of joy in her heart that from hour to hour had found expression in
bird-like carollings, little words and fugitive phrases which rippled
from her lips, the sunshine-spray from the fount of life whereon her
heart swam as a nenuphar on an upwelling pool. Annaik also had waked
at that dawn of storm. She had risen in silence, and in silence had
remained all day; giving no sign that the flame within her frayed the
nerves of her heart.
Throughout the long hours of tempest, and into that dusk wherein the
voice of the sea moved, moaning, across the land, laughter and dream
had alternated with Ynys. Annaik looked at her strangely at times, but
said nothing. Once, standing in the twilight of the dark-raftered room,
Ynys clasped her hands across her bosom and murmured, "Oh, heart be
still! My heaven is come." And in that hour, and in that place, she who
was twin to her--strange irony of motherhood, that should give birth in
one hour to Day and Night, for even as day and night were these twain,
so unlike in all things--in that hour and in that place Annaik also
clasped her hands across her bosom, and the words that died across the
shadow of her lips were, "Oh, heart be still! My hell is near."
And now he for whom both had waited stood, flooded in the red fire glow
which leaped from panel to panel, and from rafter to rafter, while,
without, the howling of the wind rose and fell in prolonged, monotonous
cadences,--anathemas, rather,--whirled through a darkness full of
bewilderment and terror.
As for Alan, it was indeed for joy to him to stand there, home once
more, with not only the savagery of the tempest behind him, but also
left behind, that unspeakably far-off, bewilderingly remote city of
Paris whence he had so swiftly come.
It is said of an ancient poet of the Druid days that he had the power
to see the lives of the living, and these as though they were phantoms,
separate from the body. Was there not a young king of Albainn who, in a
perilous hour, discovered this secret of old time, and knew how a life
may be hidden away from the body so that none may know of it, save the
wind that whispers all things, and the tides of day and night that bear
all things upon their dark flood?
King of Albainn, poet of the old time, not alone three youthful
dreamers would you have seen, there, in that storm-beset room. For
there you would have seen six figures standing side by side. Three of
these would have been Alan de Kerival, and Ynys the Dark, and Annaik
the Fair; and of the other three, one would be of a dusky-haired woman
with starry, luminous eyes; and one a pale woman with a wealth of tawny
hair, with eyes aflame, meteors in a desert place; and one a man,
young and strong and fair to see as Alan de Kerival, but round about
him a gloom, and through that gloom his eyes as stars seen among the
melancholy hills.
Happy laughter of the world that is always young--happy, in that we are
not all seers of old or kings of Albainn! For who, looking into the
mirrors of Life and seeing all that is to be seen, would look again,
save those few to whom Life and Death have come sisterly and whispered
the secret that some have discerned, how these twain are one and the
same.
Nevertheless, in that happy hour for him, Alan saw nothing of what Ynys
feared. Annaik had abruptly yielded to a strange gayety, and her swift
laugh and gypsy smile made his heart glad.
Never had he seen, even in Paris, women more beautiful. Deep-set as
his heart was in the beauty of Ynys, he found himself admiring that of
Annaik with new eyes. Truly, she was just such a woman as he had often
imagined when Ian had recited to him the ballad of the Sons of Usna or
that of how Dermid and Graine fled from the wrath of Fionn.
And they, too, looking at their tall cousin, with his wavy brown hair,
broad, low brows, gray-blue eyes, and erect carriage, thought him the
comeliest man to be seen in France; and each in her own way was proud
and glad, though one, also, with killing pain.