Читать книгу The Complete Works of Algernon Blackwood. Novels, Short Stories, Horror Classics, Occult & Supernatural Tales, Plays онлайн

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"O misty moon,

Dear, misty moon,

The nights are long without thee;

The shadows creep

Across my sleep,

And fold their wings about me!"

And another silvery voice, that might have been the voice of a star, took it up faintly, evidently from a much greater distance:

"O misty moon,

Sweet, misty moon,

The stars are dim behind thee;

And, lo, thy beams

Spin through my dreams

And weave a veil to blind me!"

The sound of this beautiful voice so delighted Jimbo that he sprang from his bed and rushed to the window, hoping that he might be able to hear it more clearly. But, before he got half-way across the room, he stopped short, trembling with terror. Underneath his very feet, in the depths of the house, he heard the awful voice he dreaded more than anything else. It roared out the lines with a sound like the rushing of a great river:

"O misty moon,

Pale misty moon,

Thy songs are nightly driven,

Eternally,

From sky to sky,

O'er the old, grey Hills of Heaven!"

And after the verse Jimbo heard a great peal of laughter that seemed to shake the walls of the house, and rooted his feet to the floor. It rolled away with thundering echoes into the very bowels of the earth. He just managed to crawl back to his mattress and lie down, when another voice took up the song, but this time in accents so tender, that the child felt something within him melt into tears of joy, and he was on the verge of recognising, for the first time since his accident, the voice of his mother: