CHAPTER II

The night came down with leisurely gloom. A dim starlight pervaded
rather than shone in the sky; Nature seemed somnolent and gravely
meditative. It brooded as broods a man who is seeking his way through a
labyrinth of ideas to a conclusion still evading him. This sense of
cogitation enveloped land and sea, and was as tangible to feeling as
human presence.

At last the night seemed to wake from reverie. A movement, a thrill, ran
through the spangled vault of dusk and sleep, and seemed to pass over the
world, rousing the sea and the earth. There was no wind, apparently no
breath of air, yet the leaves of the trees moved, the weather-vanes
turned slightly, the animals in the byres roused themselves, and
slumbering folk opening their eyes, turned over in their beds, and
dropped into a troubled doze again.

Presently there came a long moaning sound from the tide, not loud but
rather mysterious and distant--a plaint, a threatening, a warning, a
prelude?

A dull labourer, returning from late toil, felt it, and raised his head
in a perturbed way, as though some one had brought him news of a far-off
disaster. A midwife, hurrying to a lowly birth-chamber, shivered and
gathered her mantle more closely about her. She looked up at the sky,
she looked out over the sea, then she bent her head and said to herself
that this would not be a good night, that ill-luck was in the air. "The
mother or the child will die," she said to herself. A 'longshoreman,
reeling home from deep potations, was conscious of it, and, turning round
to the sea, snarled at it and said yah! in swaggering defiance. A young