St. Stephen's Eve
THE sky was a bowl of dusky azure, when Alain the page skipped over the stertorous carcass of Croquart the porter, unlatched the postern in the great gate, and crept across the trestle bridge that spanned the moat. For two nights and a day snow had fallen, spreading a cloak of glittering samite over moor and meadow, ribbing the woods with silver, deepening a winter silence over the world. Now, at St. Stephen's eve, the gray pinions of the snow-clouds had fled. A full moon had reared her silver buckler in the sky, pouring mysterious glory upon the ivory hills. The broad moat, dappled with moonbeams, stretched dim yet brilliant under the lad's feet. Above, the towers of Terabil, with their machicolated shadows, cut the dusky splendor of the sky.
It was St. Stephen's eve, and witchery breathed in the frosty silence of the hour. Alain, dimpling the snow, tucked his fustian cloak over his girdle and turned southwards, with his pert nose sniffing the air, his black eyes glistening in the moonlight. Not far distant the gaunt giants of the forest lifted up their grotesque branches to the sky. A wild arabesque, solemn and mysterious, the woods scrolled the white plain of the snow and the steel-visaged night.
It was St. Stephen's eve, the one eve in the year when Fulk of the Forest, mythical woodsman, was said to cleave the trunk of the Old Oak and come forth to hunt with ten couples of red-eyed hounds. So ran the legend on the lips of the country beldames—a legend that had ruled the ingle-nooks for centuries. On St. Stephen's eve Fulk's horn made the dim woods shudder; the baying of his ghostly pack echoed through the black bowels of the forest. And Alain, sturdy lad, with his poll packed with old wives' tales, had crept out that night from Terabil to see Black Fulk come forth.
He held on across the waste of snow, glancing up now and again from the dark barriers of the woods to the moon swimming calmly overhead. He was hugging his boyish errantry under his cloak with a species of ecstatic fear, shivering one moment till his teeth chattered, warm the next with his scamper over the snow. It was not long before he touched the trees, gaunt and solitary sentinels appealing the moon with their multitudinous hands. Their trunks crowded the distance, making strange gloom over the brilliant carpet of winter.
Alain plunged in, knowing the place well, and able to abide by the path despite the snow. Anon, as the black trunks thickened and the feltwork of boughs grew denser overhead, he came towards a broad clearing, white in the light of the moon. In the centre of the place stood a gigantic oak, gnarled, grim, and terrible, a patriarch rent by the sword of centuries, primeval and hoary in its sullen solitude. The stars seemed to hang above its branches like a magic crown.
Alain, big-eyed, alert as a weasel, huddled down behind a pile of fagots on the outskirts of the clearing. An oak log served him as a seat. He turned the hood of his cloak over his head, and sat and stared at the tree. A hundred fantastic fancies danced and nickered in his brain. His ears tingled with the frosty air; his breath rose above him like vapor.
The forest stood soundless and calm under the moon. The silence was supernatural in its utter emptiness. Not a wind stirred; not a cloud moved athwart the sky; the very earth seemed dead, a frozen planet, sunless and without life. The lad crouching by the fagots huddled his cloak about him, and still stared at the tree. The night air was freezing his courage; the sinister significance of the place began to bulk more vividly in his imagination. His eyes darted swift, restless glances into the surrounding
