In the same way, he had come to a quantum jump-point - first, in his dream of James' burial, back on Harmony, and again in Donal's bedroom, but much more so than either earlier instance, in the dining room - which was unidentifiable and unexplainable. It was easy to tell himself that it had all been the result of a sort of self-hypnosis, a self-created illusion. But deep within himself he did not believe it.
Deeply within himself, he knew better. He knew it the way he knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, sometimes, that the lines of poetry he had just put on paper said something more than the total of their individual words could explain. The poem that worked, that involved the quantum jump, opened a doorway on another universe, which could be felt - as he had felt himself to be Donal.
In the same sense there had been more to the moment in the Graemehouse dining room than all the unconscious memories of what he had heard about the Graemes could account for. Deep within him, too deep for any denial, he knew - as he knew that he lived - that what he had experienced in the dining room was not what could have happened the night of Donal's graduation from the Academy, but what had happened.
In the day or two that followed, as he began to shed his drained feeling, as the inner reservoir of physical and psychic energy began to be replaced, he began to turn more of his attention to Amanda. She was up before dawn, taking care of the house, the stable and everything else around the place. By ten in the morning she would be at work in her office with contracts; and outside of ordinary interruptions in the way of phone calls, meals and other duties around the house, or occasional necessary trips outside it, she worked steadily through until late at night.
Her efficiency was unbelievable. Clearly, she had developed the most economical technique possible for each thing she had to do; and when the time came, she did it swiftly and surely. But none of the things she did were done with the sort of habitual, machine-like response that such a conscious approach often produced. On the contrary, her executions were as easy as breathing, with the unconscious grace of an accomplished artist in the practice of her art.
On the morning of the second day, however, because his conscience bothered him, he cornered her as she started out to the stable.
"Can I help?" he asked.
"I'll tell you if you can," she said; then, watching him, her voice and expression softened. "Fal Morgan is mine. You understand?"
"Yes," he said; and stood aside to let her go.
By the third day his normal energy and strength had largely returned. He had spent most of the time sitting around, reading and thinking; but by that evening a physical restlessness began to build up inside him like water building up behind a dam. After dinner, Amanda went as usual back to her office and he tried again to read; but his thoughts wandered. The teeth of unanswered questions gnawed at him. As the days passed, he had felt something inside himself reaching out to her more and more; and his instinctive perceptions of her had sent back the message that she responded to this reaching out. But if anything, since the day at Foralie, she had drawn more and more back behind the brisk armor of her duties - and the reason for this eluded him.
Also, whatever else had taken place there, he had gone to Foralie with the purpose of finding the truth in his dream; and he had found it, only to realize that it concerned Donal Graeme - and that Donal had been an untypical Dorsai - as Cletus had been before him - and the experience in Graemehouse had been no help in bringing him to feel that he could make himself understood to the Grey Captains.
After nearly three days of circular thinking on these topics, the protest of his body at the long stretch of inactivity that had held him lately rose to an uncontrollable pitch. He put the cube he had been reading after dinner abruptly aside, and went to look through the half-open door of Amanda's office, to see if she was still at work.
She was. He left the office door and went to the closet by the back door of Fal Morgan, where an assortment of work clothing, sweaters and jackets occupied pegs on a wall-long rack. There was no jacket there quite big enough for him, but one of the sweaters, a loosely-knit bulky affair, was ample in size. He put it on, and stepped out into the night.
His intention had been only to go for a walk in the immediate vicinity of the house. But the Dorsai's single moon was nearly full and high in the sky, and the landscape around him showed clear and bright with moonlight. He walked to the edge of the open area in which Fal Morgan sat and looked down into the gully below him. Its tangle of light and dark, and the rocky upslopes beyond, attracted him; and he went down into it.
He had no real fear of getting lost. The surrounding mountain peaks were visible from any position below them; and they made excellent fixed reference points, particularly to someone raised in such territory. He crossed the gully he had chosen and continued up the slope beyond into a bare rock area of small cliffs and passes.
He lost himself in roaming the rocky area. After several days of walking only between rooms, to move freely in the open air was a relief. He had forgotten - even on Harmony when they went through the mountains, he had forgotten - how he had felt as a boy in the Rockies. Now that feeling came back. The peaks above him were not ominous and unknown shapes brooding upon the moonlit horizon; but, as they had been on Earth, sheltering giants within whose shadow he felt a freedom not to be found anywhere else. His stride lengthened, the breath in him came from the depths of his lungs, and from far inside him came a longing to cut loose from all larger duties and purposes and simply work to live, in such a place as this.
He woke, finally, to the fact that he had been walking for at least a couple of hours. Unnoticed until now, the night had chilled; and he had chilled, even with his exercise and clad in the heavy sweater. Also, now that he came down from the feeling that had uplifted him among the mountain peaks, he became conscious of the physical weariness in his not-yet-recovered body. He turned back to Fal Morgan.
As he approached the house, he carried the mountains still with him in his mind; and as he laid his hand upon the back door of Fal Morgan to open it, he discovered himself nursing a small, irrational resentment that, self-barricaded from him as she now was, Amanda had become someone he could not tell of his walk and how it had made him feel. He laughed softly and wryly to himself at the disappointment in him at that discovery, quietly opened the door and went in.
The house held the stillness of the hours toward midnight. He thought suddenly to look at his chronometer, and was startled to see that he had been outside almost three hours. Amanda would certainly have finished work by this time and be in bed.
Although there was no danger of her hearing him from the other end of the house, he went softly, out of a touch of conscience, through the kitchen and into the corridor to the living room. As he entered it, he realized that there was still light in the living room - and he hesitated. Then he realized, from the waxing and waning of its illumination, that it must be the light of the fire, still burning in the fireplace; though it was not like Amanda, in her automatic housekeeping, to go to bed with the fire still burning.
She might have left it burning for him; or she might still be up. He went forward quietly, on the chance that the second possibility was correct; and before he was halfway down the corridor he heard the sound of her voice, singing very softly, as if to herself, in the firelit room.
He was suddenly unsure; and he stopped. Then he took off his boots and went forward; not merely quietly, but with the utter silence of his early training in movement. He reached the corner of the entrance to the living room and looked cautiously around it toward the fireplace.