The Lions of the Lord | Page 3

the splendid lines
from its broad, gray base to its lofty spire, radiant with white and gold.

As he looked long and intently, the colour of new life flushed into a
face that was pinched and drawn. With fresh resolution, he bent again
to his oars, noting with a quick eye that the current had carried him far
down-stream while he stopped to look upon the holy edifice.
Landing presently at the wharf, he was stunned by the hush of the
streets. This was not like the city of twenty thousand people he had left
three months before. In blank bewilderment he stood, turning to each
quarter for some solution of the mystery. Perceiving at length that there
was really no life either way along the river, he started wonderingly up
a street that led from the waterside,--a street which, when he had last
walked it, was quickening with the rush of a mighty commerce.
Soon his expression of wonder was darkened by a shade of anxiety.
There was an unnerving quality in the trance-like stillness; and the
mystery of it pricked him to forebodings. He was now passing empty
workshops, hesitating at door after door with ever-mounting alarm.
Then he began to call, but the sound of his voice served only to
aggravate the silence.
Growing bolder, he tried some of the doors and found them to yield,
letting him into a kind of smothered, troubled quietness even more
oppressive than that outside. He passed an empty ropewalk, the hemp
strewn untidily about, as if the workers had left hurriedly. He peered
curiously at idle looms and deserted spinning-wheels--deserted
apparently but the instant before he came. It seemed as if the people
were fled maliciously just in front, to leave him in this fearfullest of all
solitudes. He wondered if he did not hear their quick, furtive steps, and
see the vanishing shadows of them.
He entered a carpenter's shop. On the bench was an unfinished door, a
plane left where it had been shoved half the length of its edge, the fresh
pine shaving still curling over the side. He left with an uncanny feeling
that the carpenter, breathing softly, had watched him from some
hiding-place, and would now come stealthily out to push his plane
again.
He turned into a baker's shop and saw freshly chopped kindling piled

against the oven, and dough actually on the kneading-tray. In a tanner's
vat he found fresh bark. In a blacksmith's shop he entered next the fire
was out, but there was coal heaped beside the forge, with the
ladling-pool and the crooked water-horn, and on the anvil was a
horseshoe that had cooled before it was finished.
With something akin to terror, he now turned from this street of shops
into one of those with the pleasant dwellings, eager to find something
alive, even a dog to bark an alarm. He entered one of the gardens,
clicking the gate-latch loudly after him, but no one challenged. He drew
a drink from the well with its loud-rattling chain and clumsy,
water-sodden bucket, but no one called. At the door of the house he
whistled, stamped, pounded, and at last flung it open with all the noise
he could make. Still his hungry ears fed on nothing but sinister echoes,
the barren husks of his own clamour. There was no curt voice of a man,
no quick, questioning tread of a woman. There were dead white ashes
on the hearth, and the silence was grimly kept by the dumb household
gods.
His nervousness increased. So vividly did his memory people the
streets and shops and houses that the air was vibrant with
sound,--low-toned conversations, shouts, calls, laughter, the voices of
children, the creaking of wagons, pounding hammers, the clangour of
many works; yet all muffled away from him, as if coming from some
phantom-land. His eyes, too, were kept darting from side to side by
vague forms that flitted privily near by, around corners, behind him,
lurking always a little beyond his eyes, turn them quickly as he would.
Now, facing the street, he shouted, again and again, from sheer
nervousness; but the echoes came back alone.
He recalled a favourite day-dream of boyhood,--a dream in which he
became the sole person in the world, wandering with royal liberty
through strange cities, with no voice to chide or forbid, free to choose
and partake, as would a prince, of all the wonders and delights that
boyhood can picture; his own master and the master of all the marvels
and treasures of earth. This was like the dream come true; but it
distressed him. It was necessary to find the people at once. He had a

feeling that his instant duty was to break some malign spell that lay
upon the place--or upon himself. For