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 fell. 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 motion 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.
