“Thank you, and good night, Sir!”
Resolutely I advanced to the foot of the cliff, and climbed up to the
first indentation in the virtually perpendicular wall. But a sullen
rage came over me as I realized the impossibility of making the ascent:
“Off in this direction, eh? But there are night hawks that seem to get
around all right--and with little loss of time!”
I grumbled the words between my clenched teeth, addressing them to my
own angry self alone. The man was fully fifty feet away and could not
possibly have heard. Yet I suddenly felt the same pressure on the back
of my head and between my shoulders which had been the cause of my
awakening. The man was looking at me! That impact was the shock from
his piercing eyes! I turned sharply about, almost expecting an attack
from him.
But he was standing just where I had left him, his eyes fixed upon me
with an expression in no sense hostile. Rather I seemed to catch a
smile of kindliness playing about his withered, wrinkly features. When
he now spoke, the same note of kindly benevolence was sensible in his
voice, and the abruptness noticeable in his first questions had also
softened measurably:
“Monsieur,” said he, “I was loathe to venture a suggestion which you
had failed to invite and which, doubtless, you would be quite unwilling
to accept. Nevertheless ... I should be grievously at fault, were I to
let you run to certain death. I will give you an hour to break a leg,
or an arm, or your neck, in tumbling into one of these gorges. Suppose
you lay with a fractured skull at the foot of a wall of rock--your
message would not be delivered any the sooner, would it? Don’t be
impatient! Wait till daylight comes! And an early morning start will
bring you to the fort and, perhaps, in time. Try to get there now and
your dispatch, I assure you, will never reach its destination!”
He stood there thinking for a moment and then he concluded pensively:
“A mountaineer as experienced as I am might possibly venture such a
thing. But at night, over rock that is forever breaking off under your
feet ...!”
I don’t know why, at just that moment, my thoughts reverted to the
other encounter I had had a few hours earlier in that self-same
neighborhood. I closed my eyes to reconstruct in my mind the image of
Madeleine, deaf, mute, unconscious apparently, running that heath like
a somnambulist.... And for the third time, but on this occasion full in
the face, I felt the impact of the fluid energy which seemed to spurt
from the eyes that were fixed upon me. When I looked up again, the same
uncontrollable terror was in possession of me: the man was in truth
gazing at me--and that was all. An extravagant suspicion flitted across
my mind: that man, that curious old man--could he be listening to the
sound of my thoughts, as I could hear the sound of his words?
At last he seemed willing to come to the point:
“Consider, Monsieur! I live not far from here! Would you not accept my
hospitality until dawn? The rain is beginning again. It will be wet
and cold on the mountains, and it is hardly midnight.”
I looked around in astonishment into the wall of darkness about us. He
lived near-by? A house, in that appalling solitude?
He understood my perplexity.
“Quite so!” he said, answering my unexpressed thought. “Quite so! Just
a step or two! This way, Monsieur, if you please!”
His voice had now a soft, caressing gentleness; though I sensed an
imperious order in his words--a command I could only obey.
When he turned to go, I followed him.