Joan thought it was like the rustle of countless leaves falling: the tiny tapping noise made by a dying leaf as it settles on the ground—multiplied enormously; but to Paul it seemed that sudden, dream-like whirr of a host of birds when they wheel sharply in mid-air—heard at a distance. There was no question about the distance at any rate.
'Are they just the trees of our woods, then?' asked Joan in a whisper that held delight and awe, 'or?'
The child laughed under her breath. 'Oh, no,' was the reply, 'all the South of England below a certain line meets here. This is one of the great starting-places. It's just like swallows collecting on the wires. Some big tree, higher than the rest, gives a sign one night—and then all the other woods flock in by thousands. Uncle Paul knew that! 'There was a touch in her voice of something between scorn and surprise.
'Did you, Uncle Paul?' Joan asked. He fidgeted in his precarious perch. 'I write the Record of it all, so I ought to,' he answered evasively.
And high up in the autumn sky, now darkening, ran on that curious sweet sound. Across the heavens, silvery in the coming moonlight, they saw long feathery clouds drawn thinly from north to south, known commonly as mares' tails.
'Those are the tracks they follow,' whispered Nixie. 'Look! Now you can see them—some of them!'
Her voice was so thrilled that it startled them. But for the fact that they were in the Crack where nothing can be ever 'lost,' both Paul and Joan might have lost their hold and their seats—to say nothing of their lives—and crashed downwards through the branches of that astonished ilex tree. Instead, they turned their eyes upwards and stared.
They looked out over the world of tree-tops. On all sides rose Something in a silent tempest, almost too delicate for words—something that touched the air with a Presence, swift and wonderful—then was gone. With it went the faint music as of myriad wheeling birds, too small for sight. And through the sky ran a vast fluttering of green. They saw the coming stars, as it were, through immense transparencies of green, stained here and there with the washed splendours of wet and dying leaves—the greens, yellows, aye, and the reds too, of autumn. For a few passing seconds the night was positively robed with the spirit-hues of the dying year, rising rapidly in the sheets of their dim glory.
'They're off!' murmured Nixie. 'It's the first flight. We are lucky!'
Far overhead the pathways of fleecy cloud were tinged with pale yellow as when the moon looks sometimes mistily upon the earth—tinged, then suddenly white and silvery as before.
They collect—Paul drew upon the child's account for his Record—far over-seas upon some lonely strand or headland, and then swarm inland, sometimes following their companions, the birds, sometimes leading them. In countless thousands they go, yet for all their numbers never causing more than a passing tremble of the air. Their armies add, perhaps, a shadow to the night, a new tint to the clouds that veil the moon; or, if owing to stress of autumn weather, they start with the daylight, then the sunset gains a strange new wonder that puzzles the heart with its beauty, and makes unimaginative people write foolish letters to the newspapers. Their speed makes it difficult to catch even the slightest indication of their flight; the sky is touched with glory, there is a reflection in the river or the sea—and they are gone! Or, perhaps, from the evergreens that stay behind, often fringing the coast, the wind bears a message of farewell, wondrous sweet; or some late birds, delaying their own departure, wake in the branches and sing in little bursts of passion the joy of their own approaching escape.
And when they return, each tree in the order of its leaving, and according to its times and needs, they bring with them all the essential glory of southern climes, and the magic of spring is due as much to the tales and memories they have collected to talk about, as to the clear brilliance of the new dresses with which they come to clothe their old bodies at home.
The Record of the Aventure, as Paul wrote it faithfully from the child's description, makes curious and instructive reading, and the loneliness of the stalwart evergreens who remain behind to face the winter brought a pathos into the tale that all lovers of trees will readily appreciate, and may be read by them in the published account.
Yet to Paul and Joan, to each according to temperament and cast of mind, the little Aventure brought thoughts of a more practical bearing. To him, especially, in the escape of the tree-spirits—of their 'insides,' as Nixie intuitively phrased it—he divined an allegory of the temporary escape of the little army of city waifs. Those boys, old in face as they were cramped in body, had enjoyed, too, a migration that clothed them for a time, outwardly and inwardly, with some passing beauty which they could take back to London with them just as the trees come back with the freshness of the spring.
And this thought led necessarily to others. The little migration of their bodies from town was important enough; but what of their minds and souls? What chance of escape was there for these?
The conclusions are obvious enough; they need no elaboration. He had already learned from Joan of their sufferings. His heart burned within him. It was all mixed up in his queer poetic mind with the swift vision of the Tree Spirits, and with the picture of Joan, Nixie, and the other children perched like big berries in that astonished ilex tree. In due season both berries and dreams must ripen. He was beginning to see the way.
'They're gone already,' Nixie interrupted his long reverie in a whisper; 'and to-night there'll be great rains to wash away all the signs. To-morrow morning, you'll see, half the trees will be bare.'
And high in the heavens, incredibly high and faint it seemed, ran the curious sweet sound, driven farther and farther into the reaches of the night, till at last it died away altogether.
'Gone,' murmured Joan, 'gone!' The beauty of it touched her voice with sadness. 'I wish we could go like that—as beautifully, as quietly, as easily!'
'Perhaps we do,' Paul thought to himself.
'I think we do,' Nixie said aloud. 'Daddy did, I'm sure. I shall, too, I think—and then come back in the spring, p'rhaps.'
CHAPTER XXIV
See where the child of heaven, with winged feet,
Runs down the slanted sunlight of the dawn.
Prometheus Unbound.
Very often in life, when the way seems all prepared for joy, there comes instead an unexpected time of sadness that makes all the preparation seem useless and of no purpose. Those coloured threads, whose ends and beginnings are not seen, weave this unexpected twist in the pattern, and one knows the bitterness that asks secretly, What can be the use of efforts thus rendered apparently null and void at a single stroke? forgetting the roots of faith that are thereby strengthened, and shutting the eyes to the glory of the whole pattern, which it is always the endeavour of the imagination to body forth.
And so it seemed to Paul a few weeks later when he returned to England from America, where he had been to settle up his affairs. For he had decided to sever his connection with the Lumber Company, and to devote his life henceforward to battling against the wrongs and sufferings of childhood. The call had come to him with no uncertain voice. Nixie had unintentionally sown the seeds; Joan had deliberately watered them; his own liberated imagination girded its loins to go forth as a labourer to the harvest.
Then, coming back with the joy of this approaching labour in his heart, the veil of great sadness descended upon his newly-opening life and set him in the midst of a dreadful void, a blank of pain and loneliness that nothing seemed able to fill. Nixie went from him. The Hand that gilds the stars, and touched her hair with the yellow of the sands, drew her also away. Just when her gentle companionship had justified itself for him as something ideally charming that should last always, a breath of wintry wind passed down upon that grey house under the hill, and, lo, she was gone—gone like the spirit of her little birch tree from the cruelties of December.
He was in time to say good-bye—nothing more; in time to see the awful