Jimbo knew now that something was wrong. This new driving power was something wholly outside himself. His wings were working far too easily.
Then, suddenly, he understood: _His wings were not working at all!_
He was not being driven forward from behind; he was being drawn forward from in front.
He saw it all in a flash: Miss Lake"s warning long ago about the danger of flying too high; the last song of the Frightened Children, "Dare you fly out alone through the shadows that wave, when the course is unknown and there"s no one to save?" the strange words sung to him about the "relentless misty moon," and the object of the dreadful Pursuer in steadily forcing him upwards and away from the earth. It all flashed across his poor little dazed mind. He understood at last.
He had soared too high and had entered the sphere of the moon"s attraction.
"The moon is too strong, and there"s death in the stars!" a voice bellowed below him like the roar of a falling mountain, shaking the sky.
The child flew screaming on. There was nothing else he could do. But hardly had the roar died away when another voice was heard, a tender voice, a whispering, sympathetic voice, though from what part of the sky it came he could not tell--
"Arrange the pillows for his little head."
But below him the wings of the Pursuer were mounting closer and closer.
He could almost feel the mighty wind from their feathers, and hear the rush of the great body between them. It was impossible to slacken his speed even had he wished; no strength on earth could have resisted that terrible power drawing upwards towards the moon. Instinctively, however, he realised that he would rather have gone forwards than backwards. He never could have faced capture by that dreadful creature behind. All the efforts of the past weeks to escape from Fright, the owner of the Empty House, now acted upon him with a c.u.mulative effect, and added to the suction of the moon-life. He shot forward at a pace that increased with every second.
At the back of his mind, too, lay some kind of faint perception that the governess would, after all, be there to help him. She had always turned up before when he was in danger, and she would not fail him now. But this was a mere ghost of a thought that brought little comfort, and merely added its quota of force to the speed that whipped him on, ever faster, into the huge white moon-world in front.
For this, then, he had escaped from the horror of the Empty House! To be sucked up into the moon, the "relentless, misty moon"--to be drawn into its cruel, silver web, and destroyed. The Song to the Misty Moon outside the window came back in s.n.a.t.c.hes and added to his terror; only it seemed now weeks ago since he had heard it. Something of its real meaning, too, filtered down into his heart, and he trembled anew to think that the moon could be a great, vast, moving Being, alive and with a purpose....
But why, oh, why did they keep shouting these horrid s.n.a.t.c.hes of the song through the sky? Trapped! Trapped! The word haunted him through the night:
Thy songs are nightly driven, From sky to sky, Eternally, O"er the old, grey hills of heaven!
_Caught!_ Caught at last! The moon"s prisoner, a captive in her airless caves; alone on her dead white plains; searching for ever in vain for the governess; wandering alone and terrified.
By the awful grace Of thy weird white face.
The thought crazed him, and he struggled like a bird caught in a net.
But he might as well have struggled to push the worlds out of their courses. The power against him was the power of the universe in which he was nothing but a little, lost, whirling atom. It was all of no avail, and the moon did not even smile at his feeble efforts. He was too light to revolve round her, too impalpable to create his own orbit; he had not even the consistency of a comet; he had reached the point of stagnation, as it were--the dead level--the neutral zone where the attractions of the earth and moon meet and counterbalance one another--where bodies have no weight and existence no meaning.
Now the moon was close upon him; he could see nothing else. There lay the vast, shining sea of light in front of him. Behind, the roar of the following creature grew fainter and fainter, as he outdistanced it in the awful swiftness of the huge drop down upon the moon mountains.
Already he was close enough to its surface to hear nothing of its great singing but a deep, confused murmur. And, as the distance increased, he realised that the change in his own condition increased. He felt as if he were flying off into a million tiny particles--breaking up under the effects of the deadly speed and the action of the new moon-forces.
Immense, invisible arms, half-silver and half-shadow, grew out of the white disc and drew him downwards upon her surface. He was being merged into the life of the moon.
There was a pause. For a moment his wings stopped dead. Their vain fluttering was all but over....
Hark! Was that a voice borne on the wings of some lost wind? Why should his heart beat so tumultuously all at once?
He turned and stared into the ocean of black air overhead till it turned him dizzy. A violent trembling ran through his tired being from head to foot. He had heard a voice--a voice that he knew and loved--a voice of help and deliverance. It rang in shrill syllables up the empty s.p.a.ces, and it reached new centres of force within him that touched his last store of courage and strength.
"Jimbo, hold on!" it cried, like a faint, thin, p.r.i.c.king current of sound almost unable to reach him through the seas of distance. "I"m coming; hold on a little longer!"
It was the governess. She was true to the end. Jimbo felt his heart swell within him. She was mounting, mounting behind him with incredible swiftness. The sound of his own name in these terrible regions recalled to him some degree of concentration, and he strove hard to fight against the drawing power that was seeking his destruction.
He struggled frantically with his wings. But between him and the governess there was still the power of Fright to be overcome--the very Power she had long ago invoked. It was following him still, preventing his turning back, and driving him ever forward to his death.
Again the voice sounded in the night; and this time it was closer. He could not quite distinguish the words. They buzzed oddly in his ears ...
other voices mingled with them ... the hideous children began to shriek somewhere underneath him ... wings with eyes among their burning feathers flashed past him.
His own wings folded close over his little body, drooping like dead things. His eyes closed, and he turned on his side. A huge face that was one-half the governess and the other half the head gardener at home, thrust itself close against his own, and blew upon his eyelids till he opened them. Already he was falling, sinking, tumbling headlong through a s.p.a.ce that offered no resistance.
"Jimbo!" shrieked a voice that instantly died away into a wail behind him.
He opened his eyes once more--for it was that loved voice again--but the glare from the moon so dazzled him that he could only fancy he saw the figure of the governess, not a hundred feet away, struggling and floundering in the clutch of a black creature that beat the air with enormous wings all round her. He saw her hair streaming out into the night, and one wing seemed to hang broken and useless at her side.
He was turning over and over, like a piece of wood in the waves of the sea, and the governess, caught by Fright, the monster of her own creation, drifted away from his consciousness as a dream melts away in the light of the morning.... From the gleaming mountains and treeless plains below Jimbo thought there rose a hollow roar like the mocking laughter of an immense mult.i.tude of people, shaking with mirth. The Moon had got him at last, and her laughter ran through the heavens like a wave. Revolving upon his own little axis so swiftly that he neither saw nor heard anything more, he dropped straight down upon the great satellite.
The light of the moon flamed up into his eyes and dazzled him.
But what in the world was this?
How could the moon dwindle so suddenly to the size of a mere lamp flame?
How could the whole expanse of the heavens shrink in an instant to the limits of a little, cramped room?
In a single second, before he had time to realise that he felt surprise, the entire memory of his recent experiences vanished from his mind. The past became an utter blank. Like a wreath of smoke everything melted away as if it had never been at all. The functions of the brain resumed their normal course. The delirium of the past few hours was over.
Jimbo was lying at home on his bed in the night-nursery, and his mother was bending over him. At the foot of the bed stood the doctor in black.
The nurse held a lamp, only half shaded by her hand, as she approached the bedside.
This lamp was the moon of his delirium--only he had quite forgotten now that there had ever been any moon at all.
The little thermometer, thrust into his teeth among the stars, was still in his mouth. A hot-water bottle made his feet glow and burn. And from the walls of the sick-room came as it were the echoes of recently-uttered sentences: "Take his temperature! Give him the medicine the moment he wakes! Put the hot bottle to his feet.... Fetch the ice-bag.... Quick!"
"Where am I, mother?" he asked in a whisper.
"You"re in bed, darling, and must keep quite quiet. You"ll soon be all right again. It was the old black cow that tossed you. The gardener found you by the swinging gate and carried you in.... You"ve been unconscious!"
"How long have I been uncon----?" Jimbo could not manage the whole word.
"About three hours, darling."
Then he fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, and when he woke long after it was early morning, and there was no one in the room but the old family nurse, who sat watching beside the bed. Something--some dim memory--that had stirred his brain in sleep, immediately rushed to his lips in the form of an inconsequent question. But before he could even frame the sentence, the thought that prompted it had slipped back into the deeper consciousness he had just left behind with the trance of deep sleep.
But the old nurse, watching every movement, waiting upon the child"s very breath, had caught the question, and she answered soothingly in a whisper--
"Oh, Miss Lake died a few days after she left here," she said in a very low voice. "But don"t think about her any more, dearie! She"ll never frighten children again with her silly stories."
"_DIED!_"
Jimbo sat up in bed and stared into the shadows behind her, as though his eyes saw something she could not see. But his voice seemed almost to belong to some one else.
"She was really dead all the time, then," he said below his breath.
Then the child fell back without another word, and dropped off into the sleep which was the first step to final recovery.