Yet somehow, by unregistered degrees and secretly, they loosened the joints of his armour day by day and hour by hour.
CHAPTER IX
All the Powers that vivify nature must be children, for all the fairies, and gnomes, the goblins, yes, and the great giants too, are only different sizes and shapes and characters of children.
—GEORGE MACDONALD.
It was a week later, and Paul was smoking his evening pipe on the lawn before dinner. His sister was in London for a couple of days. Mile. Fleury had gone to the dentist in the neighbouring town and had not yet returned. The children, consequently, had been running rather wild.
The sun had barely disappeared, when the full moon, rising huge and faint in the east, cast a silvery veil over the gardens and the wood. The night came treading softly down the sky, passing with an almost visible presence from the hills to the motionless trees in the valley, and then sinking gently and mysteriously down into the very roots of the grass and flowers.
During the day there had been rain—warm showers alternating with dazzling sunshine as in April—and now the earth, before going to sleep, was sending out great wafts of incense. Paul sniffed it in with keen enjoyment.
The odour of burning wood floated to him over the tree tops, hanging a little heavily in the moist atmosphere; he thought of a hundred fires of his own making—elsewhere, far away! 'And grey dawns saw his camp-fires in the rain,' he murmured.
He wandered down to the Larch Gate, so called by the children because the larches stood there about the entrance of the wood like the porch of some forest temple. He halted, listening to the faint drip-drip of the trees, and as he listened, he thought; and his thoughts, like stones falling through a deep sea, sank down into the depths of him where so little light was that no words came to give them form or substance.
Overhead, the blue lanes of the sky down which the sunlight had poured all day were slowly softening for the coming of the stars; and in himself the plastic depths, he felt, were a-stirring, as though some great change that he could not alter or control were about to take place in him. He was aware of an unwonted undercurrent of excitement in his blood. It seemed to him that there was 'something afoot,' although he had no evidence to warrant the suspicion.
'Something's up to-night,' he murmured between the puffs of his pipe. 'There's something in the air!'
He blew a long whiff of smoke and watched it melt away over a bed of mignonette among the blue shadows where the dusk gathered beneath the ilex trees. There, for a moment, his eye followed it, and just as it sifted off into transparency he became aware with a start of surprise that behind the bushes something was moving. He looked closer.
'It's stopped,' he muttered; 'but only a second ago it was moving—moving parallel with myself.'
Paul was well accustomed to watching the motions of wild creatures in the forest; his eye was trained like the eye of an Indian. The gloom at first was too dense for anything to differentiate itself from their general mass, but after a short inspection his sight detected little bits of shadow that were lighter or darker than other little bits. The moving thing began to assume outline.
'It's a person!' he decided. 'It's somebody watching—watching me! '
He took a step forward, and the figure likewise advanced, keeping even pace with him. He went faster, and the figure also went faster; it moved very silently, very softly, 'like an Indian,' he thought with admiration. Behind the Blue Summer-house, where they sometimes had tea on wet days, it disappeared.
'There are no cattle-stealers, or timber-sneaks in this country,' he reflected, 'but there are burglars. Perhaps this is a burglar who knows Margaret is away and thinks—'
He had not time to finish what the burglar thought, for at that moment, at the top of the Long Walk, where the moonlight already lay in a patch, the figure suddenly dashed out at full speed from the cover of the bushes, and he beheld, not a burglar, but—a little girl in a blue frock with a broad white collar, and long, black spindle legs.
'Nixie, my dear child!' he exclaimed. 'But aren't you in bed?'
It was a stupid question of course, and she did not attempt to answer it, but came up close to him, picking her way neatly between the flower-beds. The moon gleamed on her shiny black shoes and on her shiny yellow hair; over her summer dress she wore a red cloak, but it was open and only held to her by two thin bands about the neck. Under the:! hood he saw her elf-like face, the expression grave, but the eyes bright with excitement, and she moved softly over the grass like a shadow, timidly, yet without hesitation. A small, warm hand stole into his.
Paul put his pipe, still alight, into his pocket like a naughty boy caught smoking, and turned to face her.
'Pon my soul, Nixie, I believe you really an a sprite!'
She let go his hand and sprang away lightly over the lawn, laughing silently, her hood dropping off so that her hair flew out in a net to catch the moonlight, and for an instant he imagined he was looking at running water, swift and dancing; but the very next second she was back at his side again, the red hood replaced, the cloak gathered tightly about her slim person, feeling for his big hand again with both of her own.
'At night I am a sprite,' she whispered laughing, 'and mind I don't bewitch you altogether! '
She drew him gently across the lawn, choosing the direction with evident purpose, and he, curiously and suddenly bereft of all initiative, allowed her to do as she would.
'But, please, Uncle Paul,' she went on with vast gravity, 'I want you to be serious now. I've something to say to you, and that's why I'm not in bed when I ought to be. All the other Sprites are about too, you know, so be very careful how you answer.'
The big man allowed himself to be led away. He felt his armour dropping off in great flakes as he went. No light is so magical as in that mingled hour of sun and moon when the west is still burning and the east just a-glimmer with the glory that is to come. Paul felt it strongly. He was half with the sun and half with the moon, and the gates of fantasy seemed somewhere close at hand. Curtains were being drawn aside, veils lifting, doors softly opening. He almost heard the rush of the wind behind, and tasted the keen, sweet excitement of another world.
He turned sharply to look at his companion. But first he put the hood back, for she seemed more human that way.
'Well, child!' he said, as gruffly as he could manage, 'and what is it you have stayed up so late to ask me?'
'It's something I have to say to you, not to ask, she replied at once demurely. There was a delicious severity about her.
After a pause of twenty seconds she tripped round in front of him and stared full into his face. He felt as though she cried 'Hands up' and held a six-shooter to his head. She pulled the trigger that same moment.
'Isn't it time now to stop writing all those Reports, and to take off your dressing-up things?' she asked with decision.
Paul stopped abruptly and tried to disengage his hand, but she held him so tightly that he could not escape without violence.
'What dressing-up things are you talking about?' he asked, forcing a laugh which, he admitted himself, sounded quite absurd.
'All this pretending that you're so old, and don't know about things—I mean real things—our things.'
He searched as in a fever for the right words—words that should be true and wise, and safe—but before he could pick them out of the torrent of sentences that streamed through his mind, she had gone on again. She spoke calmly, but very gravely.
'We are so tired of helping to pretend