Page:The Old Countess (1927).pdf/235



O Graham started. Spring had returned again. The river still roared under the wall; but the sky was cloudless, a vast, blue sky against which trees and cliffs and villages glittered in the wind and sunlight. But though so blue, so glittering, the day was tempestuous; a Vulcan chained; such a fury of implicit power lay beneath its gladness. The great wind came swooping down the gorges and the edges of the waves were sharp with gold and silver.

While Graham was still on the lower road he saw Marthe Ludérac descending to the island, high on the promontory. She was leading a goat—even at his distance he could see the careful, tentative steps of the creature as it followed her—and on her shoulder she carried a young kid.

Dark, slightly bent with her burden against the sky, she was like a woodcut of the Good Shepherd. Her silhouette, dark and far and small, seemed to belong to distant ages. He stood and watched her until she had disappeared in a lower fold of the cliff and then, slowly, he went forward.

He had but a little way to go before the road turned to climb the promontory; but he did not follow it. He paused for a moment, looking up at the cliff or out at the river, and then walked out onto the causeway.