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Updated: June 4, 2025
To the night-birds of the streets and the noisy fiacre drivers outside, and to the crowd of guests who stood on the high marble steps waiting for their turn to depart, he might have been relating an amusing anecdote of the ball just over. "I'm in great trouble, old man," was what he said. "I must see you alone to-night.
The clocks of the town had struck eleven, and most of the legitimate sweethearts who make the Park their lover's walk had gone home, leaving this realm of lawns and trees and waters to the night-birds, the pickpockets, the soldiers, and the unhealthily curious persons over whom it exercises such a continual and gloomy fascination.
"Let us watch them go away!" said Yves, leaning out. At the door of the garden is a renewal of the same salutations and curtseys, and then the two groups of women separate, their bedaubed paper lanterns fade away trembling in the distance, balanced at the extremity of flexible canes which they hold in their fingertips as one would hold a fishing-rod in the dark to catch night-birds.
Nothing has proved useless to them; it seems as if in their love for so beautiful a country the only province of France never occupied by foreigners they have determined not to lose the least part of its soil, the smallest grain of its sand. Do you fancy that this ruined tower is inhabited only by hideous night-birds?
One of those night-birds who wonder round with a basket on their back and crook in hand, and were, during the Revolution, facetiously called the Committee of Research, was standing by the curbstone where the two men now stopped. This scavenger had a shriveled face worthy of those immortalized by Charlet in his caricatures of the sweepers of Paris. "Do you ever pick up a thousand-franc note?"
The deep gloom of the forest, in the spectral light which revealed on all sides of me a compact and unending growth of trunks, and an impervious canopy of somber foliage; the shrieking of night-birds; the supernaturally human scream of the Mountain lion; the prolonged howl of the wolf, made me insensible to all other forms of suffering.
Society was approaching one of those epochs, when all things appear unreal, monstrous, gliding toward some great catastrophe. All rascaldom was rampant. The night-birds had come forth. Vice stalked, and flaunted its feathers in the light of day. Chaos seemed coming, and with it all the powers of darkness.
Mr Bickers, in the fulness of his heart, took a little round of the big square on his way home, with the double intent of giving himself the air, and perchance intercepting, for the good of the school, one or more youthful night-birds in their truant excursions.
Perfect silence on the upper floor; only the solemn shadows of the night, as the moon rises higher and higher, and the plaintive cries of the night-birds alone betoken life. Through the windows the white-jacketed house-servants are rushing gayly to and from the dining-room. All the rooms are dimly lighted. The President's apartment is fragrant with blossoms, and the lace counterpane turned down.
'The carriage is ordered for eight o'clock, continued the practical Concepcion, rolling a cigarette, which he placed behind his ear where a clerk would carry his pen. 'Those who take the road when the night-birds come abroad have something to hide. We will see what they have in their carriage, eh? The horses are hired for the journey to Galvez, where a relay is doubtless ordered.
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