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Updated: May 29, 2025
"Which by mid-night," she said quickly, "the nightbirds will have, by the flutter of their wings, blown into the right current, and from poor Lionel." "So, so, Vaura, you speak warmly; it is as I feared; he has made you care for him." "He has."
Over the dark forest the stars came out on a velvet sky, and a little wind came out of the south, nightbirds called from the depths, and peace spread over the Northland like a blanket. While the twilight lasted with its gorgeous phantasmagoria there were none of the accustomed sounds of pleasure in the post, no fiddle squeaked by the stockade wall, no happy laughter wafted from the cabins.
Save for a belated roysterer singing on his way homeward, and one or two nightbirds on the street below whose footfalls sounded fitfully, no whisper broke on the eerie night. I looked around and about in the moonlight, and noted a passage behind me between the roofs of the 'lands. Here surely would be the way by which 'Brownie' would return from his nocturnal excursion.
He did not come back along the road through Ypres to Cassel. From the balcony one could see the nightbirds fly. On every moonlight night German raiders were about bombing our camps and villages. One could see just below the hill how the bombs crashed into St.-Marie Capelle and many hamlets where British soldiers lay, and where peasants and children were killed with them.
That stifled hum of Midnight, when Traffic has lain down to rest; and the chariot-wheels of Vanity, still rolling here and there through distant streets, are bearing her to Halls roofed in, and lighted to the due pitch for her; and only Vice and Misery, to prowl or to moan like nightbirds, are abroad: that hum, I say, like the stertorous, unquiet slumber of sick Life, is heard in Heaven!
He heard the occasional cry of the nightbirds and the booming of the surf on the reefs and the shore of the isle, and saw numerous fireflies flit to and fro, and that was all. "I don't believe they'll come back," he murmured to himself. "Like as not they are afraid to advance on the trail and also afraid to trust themselves to this jungle in the darkness."
He heard the squeal of the hare as the crouching fox sprang out; and the flutter of the partridge as the jackal seized its prey. He heard the slither of the viper as it glided through the grass beside His head; and was startled by the shrieking of the nightbirds, and the flapping of their wings, as they whirled and swooped about Him.
Bradley assenting, went with him into an early public-house, haunted by unsavoury smells of musty hay and stale straw, where returning carts, farmers' men, gaunt dogs, fowls of a beery breed, and certain human nightbirds fluttering home to roost, were solacing themselves after their several manners; and where not one of the nightbirds hovering about the sloppy bar failed to discern at a glance in the passion-wasted nightbird with respectable feathers, the worst nightbird of all.
A low murmur of water from a distant rapid, a light ripple in the nearer stream, the occasional howl of the prairie wolf, and the dismal wailing of nightbirds, were the only sounds that fell upon the ear. But although the man-stalkers were making their way through thick underwood, not a sound betokened their advance.
As it was, people came and went a good deal, but they came formally or because some specific errand brought them, and most of the errands, Keith soon realized, were connected with a desire for help. The old women living like nightbirds in the garret, would drop in frequently, and almost invariably with some tale of woe that sooner or later drew from the mother relief in one form or another.
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