16
WHEN evening fell, warm and flower-scented, they emerged, in their summer-gorgeous robes, from the vermilion-tiled Pavilion, and filed down towards the Lake. They stood on a lacquer bridge at the head of a creek and looked silently across the sheen of water.
“Look!” whispered Lychnis, “the Rock!”
It seemed to float before them, in a vapour of evening. The middle and upper reaches of the sky were clear and summer-foreboding, but clouds loomed up from behind the mountains beyond the opposite shore, and opened like large summer flowers.
The Sages went down and stood on a lawn by the water under a huge flowering tree of unknown kind. Great petals, coloured deep rose, floated down among them. Lychnis caught one in her hands and inhaled its odour. Her petal-eyelids closed.
Fulke, roaming disconsolately at large, discovered a mooring-stage of red painted bamboo among reeds, and there were two or three richly coloured skiffs, with pointed bows and little masts, tied to it. He leapt on the raft, and there was an outcry of waterfowl among the reeds, loudly disturbing the silence. They listened.
“Shall we go out a little way on the water?” He invited Lychnis huskily.
But Lychnis stood quite still, looking at the Rock.
“You, Ruby?” To make Lychnis envious, perhaps.
“I’d rather stay here,” said Ruby, shuddering a little.
Nobody, not even Quentin, responded to his invitation. The evening was so still. Perhaps a faint awe was on their hearts.
The deep colour faded gradually out, and the light died off the lapping water. A fish leapt. Night stole over the valley and fell about the Rock. One by one their hearts misgave them at the experience of beauty. They quailed before the task of mastering it with their souls, and drew away. Lychnis only still gazed, and Ambrose studied her.
“Come, my dearest,” said Lord Sombrewater, turning, as he went, to draw her by the arm.
An ecstatic sigh escaped her. She seemed unable to move. Ambrose and her father, and one by one the others, turned to see what held her so fast.
The Rock was ablaze with orange-hued lanterns, as if in the middle of the water a rhododendron bush had suddenly put forth flowers.
“Almighty, and as we hope merciful, God!” Quentin was spontaneously upon his knees.
A rocket crept up the black sky, and twenty dying red suns were extinguished in the Lake. Another and another.
“An extremely ceremonious welcome,” muttered Lord Sombrewater. “Who is our host, I wonder?”
“Lavish, to say the least,” replied Frew-Gaff.
The display lasted an hour. The culminating device was a vermilion dragon that writhed and grinned high up above the Rock. With that the entertainment abruptly ceased, leaving the night darker.
“How shall we find the way?” asked Ruby, with a quiver in her voice. But two or three servants, with kindly-meant if ghostly foresight, appeared out of nowhere to guide them, and they went their several ways through the spectral groves of bamboo, looking back now and then towards the Lake.