Wogan went from the parlour and climbed out of the house by the
rope-ladder. He left it hanging at the window and walked up the
glimmering road, a ribbon of ghostly white between dim hills. It was
then about half-past twelve of the night, and not a feather of cloud
stained the perfection of the sky. It curved above his head spangled
like a fair lady's fan, and unfathomably blue like Clementina's eyes
when her heart stirred in their depths. He reached the little footway
and turned into the upward cleft of the hills. He walked now into the
thick night of a close-grown clump of dwarf-oaks, which weaved so dense
a thatch above his head that he knocked against the boles. The trees
thinned, he crossed here and there a dimpled lawn in the pure starshine,
he traversed a sparse grove of larches in the dreamy twilight, he came
out again upon the grassy lip of a mountain torrent which henceforth
kept him company, and which, speaking with many voices, seemed a friend
trying to catch his mood. For here it leaped over an edge of rock, and
here in a tiny waterfall, and splashed into a pellucid pool, and the
reverberating noise filled the dell with a majestic din; there it ran
smoothly kissing its banks with a murmur of contentment, embosoming the
stars; beyond, it chafed hoarsely between narrow walls; and again half a
mile higher up it sang on shallows and evaded the stones with a tinkling
laugh. But Wogan was deaf to the voices; he mounted higher, the trees
ceased, he came into a desolate country of boulders; and the higher he
ascended, the more heavily he walked. He stopped and washed his face and
hands clean of blood-stains in the stream. Above him and not very far
away was the lonely hut.
He came upon it quite suddenly. For the path climbed steeply at the
back, and slipping from the mouth of a narrow gully he stood upon the
edge of a small plateau in the centre of which stood the cabin, a little
house of pinewood built with some decoration and elegance. One unglazed
window was now unshuttered, and the light from a lantern streamed out of
it in a yellow fan, marking the segment of a circle upon the rough rocky
ground and giving to the dusk of the starshine a sparkle of gold.
Through the window Wogan could see into the room. It was furnished
simply, but with an eye to comfort. He saw too the girl he had dared to
bear off from the thick of a hostile town. She was lying upon a couch,
her head resting upon her folded arms. She was asleep, and in a place
most solitary. Behind the cabin rose a black forest of pines, pricking
the sky with their black spires, and in front of it the ground fell
sharply to the valley, in which no light gleamed; beyond the valley rose
the dim hills again. Nor was there any sound except the torrent. The
air at this height was keen and fresh with a smell of primeval earth.
Wogan hitched his cloak about his throat, and his boots rang upon the
rock. The Princess raised her head; Wogan walked to the door and stood
for a little with his hand upon the latch. He lifted it and entered.
Clementina looked at him for a moment, and curiously. She had no
questions as to how his struggle with the Governor of Trent's emissaries
had fared. Wogan could understand by some unspoken sympathy that that
matter had no place in her thoughts. She stood up in an attitude of
expectation.