She looked like a saint,
he thought; perhaps it was as a saint of help and guidance, the
Virgin was sending her to him and his people. The darkness
deepened, became blackness; only the red gleams from the fire
broke it, in swaying rifts, as the wind makes rifts in black
storm-clouds in the heavens. With the darkness, the stillness also
deepened. Nothing broke that, except an occasional motion of
Baba or the pony, or an alert signal from Capitan; then all seemed
stiller than ever. Alessandro felt as if God himself were in the
canon. Countless times in his life before he had lain in lonely
places under the sky and watched the night through, but he never
felt like this. It was ecstasy, and yet it was pain. What was to come
on the morrow, and the next morrow, and the next, and the next,
all through the coming years? What was to come to this beloved
and loving woman who lay there sleeping, so confident, so trustful,
guarded only by him,-- by him, Alessandro, the exile, fugitive,
homeless man?
Before the dawn, wood-doves began their calling. The canon was
full of them, no two notes quite alike, it seemed to Alessandro's
sharpened sense; pair after pair, he fancied that he recognized,
speaking and replying, as did the pair whose voices had so
comforted him the night he watched under the geranium hedge by
the Moreno chapel,-- "Love?" "Here!" "Love?" "Here!" They
comforted him still more now.
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