“See, how kind she is, little Wonder!  See how she smiles—­how she loves you.  She loves little girls, and she never sees any up here in the lonely wood.  It will make her so happy.  Kiss her, little Wonder!”

Reluctantly the child obeyed, and with a shudder she said:—­

“Oh, how cold her lips are, Daddy!”

“But were they not sweet, little Wonder?”

“No, Daddy, they tasted of dust.”

And as Antony had lifted her up, he had said in his heart:  “Silencieux,
I bring you my little child.”

CHAPTER XII

AUTUMN IN THE VALLEY

Autumn in the valley was autumn, melancholy and sinister, as you find her only in such low-lying immemorial drifting places of leaves, and oozy sinks of dank water.  For the moors autumn is the spring come back in purple, and in golden woods and many another place where the year dies happily, she smiles like a widow so young and fair that one thinks rather of life than death in her presence.

But in the valley Autumn was a fearsome hag, a little crazy, two-double, gathering sticks in a scarlet cloak.  When she turned her wicked old eyes upon you, the life died within you, and wherever you walked she was always somewhere in the bushes muttering evil spells.  All the year round under the green cloud of summer, you might meet Autumn creeping somewhere in the valley, like foul mists that creep from pool to pool; for here all the year was decay to feed upon and dead leaves for her to sleep on.  Always the year round in the valley, if you listened close, you would hear something sighing, something dying.  To the happiest walking there would come strange sinkings of the heart, unaccountable premonitions of overhanging doom.  There the least superstitious would start at the sight of a toad, and come upon three magpies at once not without fear.  Over all was a breath of imminent disaster, a look of sorrow from which there was no escape.  It was not many yards away from a merry high-road, but once in the shade of its lanes, it seemed as though you had been shut away from the world of living men.  Black slopes of pine and melancholy bars of sunset walled you in, as in some funeral hall of judgment.

Alas!  Beatrice’s was not the happiest of hearts, and all day long this autumn, as the mornings came later and darker and the evenings earlier, always voices in the valley, voices of low-hanging mist and dripping rain, kept saying:  “Death is coming!  Death is coming!”

Tapped at the windows, ticking and crying in the rooms, was the same message; till, in a terror of the walls, she would flee into the wider prison of the woods, and oppressed by them in turn, would escape with a beating heart into the honest daylight of the high-road.  So one flies from a haunted house, or comes out of an evil dream.

Sometimes it seemed as if the white face of Silencieux looked out from the woodside, and mocked her with the same cry:  “Death is coming!  Death is coming!”