I turned deliberately and walked along to the southern end of the balcony until I stood above the salon.
The light from the long windows, muted by gold curtains, streamed softly across the loggia and onto the terrace. The bare rose-bushes stood out, thorn and twig in a naked mesh netting the light. Their shadows raked away like besoms over the freshly-dug beds. One window had been opened to the mild night, and here the light streamed out boldly, and with it the sound of talk and laughter. I could imagine the spurting glow of the log fire, the gleam of rummers, the smell of coffee and brandy, and cigars…
Goodnight, Miss Eyre… amusement supervened and with it sanity. I grinned to myself as I walked softly back to my own window. If I did have to spend the rest of my life sitting in the corner of someone else's drawing-room, knitting and wearing black bombazine-whatever that was-then by God it would be the best bombazine. The very best bombazine.
Ignoring the anodynes of book, radio and stockings-to-wash, I got my coat and went out.
I went down the zigzag very slowly, for in the faint moonlight the slope was deceptive, and the slight dampness made the surface slippery. There was a way down through the wood itself- a steep track of alternate step-and-slope that short-circuited the zigzag-but it would have been too dark under the trees, so I avoided it and kept to the road.
The air was very still. Below me, in the valley-depths where the river ran, I could see, quite distinctly now, the pale drift of mist. The owl cried again once, very sadly, from the wood. There was a strong wet smell of earth and growing things; the smell of spring… not softness, not balm-and-blossoms, but something harsh and sharp that pierced the senses as the thrust of new life broke the ground. The cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land… yes, that was it. That was it. Not for the first time I was sharply grateful to Daddy for making poetry a habit with me. The best words in the best order… one always got the same shock of recognition and delight when someone's words swam up to meet a thought or name a picture. Daddy had been right. Poetry was awfully good material to think with.
Something rustled in last year's beech-leaves and poetry fled as, absurdly, I remembered that there were still bears in France. And boars. And probably wolves. And werewolves and vampires too, no doubt… by mocking myself I got at length safely down to river-level and the bridge to the main road.
The bridge was an elegant affair of the eighteenth century, with carved balustrading that opened in graceful curves towards the river-banks. The mist was thick here, but only in patches. Where I stood it was waist-high, but beyond the parapet to my right it slanted down like a snowbank to lie low over the water, pinned through here and there by spikes of bulrush and the black spars of dead boughs.
The water itself was invisible. The sound of it was dark and deep, a lovely liquid undertone to the night. The owl's breathy call fell less sadly now, less hollowly through the dim boughs.
I stood still in the centre of the bridge, my hands deep in my pockets, and gazed up at the steeply wooded slope on the other side of the main road. Rank upon rank of pines, I knew, crowded up those rocky heights, with here and there a bare crag jutting through, where in daylight the hawks mewed and circled. Now, in the faint moonlight, the forest was no more than a looming darkness, a towering cloud faintly luminous where the crescent moon feather-edged the rims of the pines. The scent drifted down, spicy and sharp and somehow dark like the pines themselves.
A car was coming up the valley. I heard the sound of the engine grow and fade and grow again as the curving road and the mist cut off and distorted the sound. It came round Belle Surprise, high above the mist, before I saw its lights. I saw them turn then, tilt, and drive down into the darkness, to bend this way and that among the trees, brightening and then blurring as the fog-clouds blunted them. I watched the stems of the trees outline themselves sharply against the light, to reel away like logs tumbling over a waterfall, then swoop back and up into the towering shadow behind the glare where still the tree-stems blanched, drifted, and darkened…
Only a late lorry driving up to Soubirous… The headlights went steadily past the end of the bridge, and the mist tossed and whirled in the red of the tail-lamp.
I was turning to go back up the zigzag, when my eye was caught by a tiny light high up among the Dieudonné trees. A minute before it had not been there, but now it pricked through the cloud of pines like a small yellow star.
I stopped and looked up at it. The trees along the roadside were busy in their ghostly dance as another lorry roared up the valley, but that tiny light hung there high above them, warm and steady. No, not a star: a planet, and lived-on at that. It might very well not be William Blake's little hut at four thousand feet, but somehow I thought it was. I smiled to myself picturing him sitting up there with his bandages and boluses (what was a bolus?) and thermometers in degrees Centigrade. The second lorry thundered past the end of the bridge.
And the cognac--had he remembered the cognac?
I hadn't noticed the car travelling quietly behind the enormous lorry. I didn't see it until it turned sharp onto the narrow bridge and came at me like a torpedo.
It was an easy corner, and he took it fast. The main beam leaped out and pinned me full in the glare. I heard his brakes shriek as they bit metal. I jumped for the edge of the road. The lights lurched and tyres screeched and ripped the tarmac. One yard: that was all the leeway he had. Something grabbed at me; tore. I slipped on the greasy road and fell flat in the gutter under the parapet as the car went by with a foot and a half to spare and screamed to a skidding halt beyond the bridge.
The engine cut. The door slammed. Léon de Valmy's voice said: "Where are you? Are you hurt? I didn't touch you, did I?" Quick footsteps sounded on the tarmac. "Where are you?"
I had risen to my knees in the wet gutter, and was holding rather hard to the parapet. At the sound of the footsteps and that familiar voice I thought I must have been hit and gone mad. I was blind, too. I couldn't see anything, anyone. I was blinking in a dazed sort of panic as I pulled myself shakily to my feet…
I wasn't blinded after all; the mist sank and dwindled and swirled waist-high again as I turned, leaning back for support against the parapet.
Nor was I mad. The man who was striding towards me in the moonlight was not Léon de Valmy, though thirty years ago Léon de Valmy had probably looked exactly like him. As with his father, my first impression of Raoul de Valmy was that he was remarkably good-looking; but where age and illness had given the older man's looks the fine-drawn, fallen-angel quality he had mocked to me on our first meeting, there was nothing in the least fine-drawn about Raoul. He merely looked tough, arrogant, and (at the moment) furious. It wasn't exactly the time to judge whether he possessed the charm which his father could apparently radiate at will, though his personality certainly made (this without irony) as strong an impact. But the difference was there again: where Léon de Valmy kept himself banked down, so to speak, and burning secretly, Raoul was at full blaze. And just now he was blazing with something more than personality. He was as shaken as I was, and it had made him angry.
I sat down suddenly on the parapet, and waited. He loomed over me, tall and formidable-looking in the misty moonlight.