--she listened. The storm was
rising. It came with a sudden and impetuous rush that made all further
sleep for her impossible.

Alone in a shaking world, it seemed, she lay and listened. That storm
interpreted for her mind the climax. The Forest bellowed out its victory
to the winds; the winds in turn proclaimed it to the Night. The whole
world knew of her complete defeat, her loss, her little human pain. This
was the roar and shout of victory that she listened to.

For, unmistakably, the trees were shouting in the dark. These were
sounds, too, like the flapping of great sails, a thousand at a time, and
sometimes reports that resembled more than anything else the distant
booming of enormous drums. The trees stood up--the whole beleaguering
host of them stood up--and with the uproar of their million branches
drummed the thundering message out across the night. It seemed as if
they had all broken loose. Their roots swept trailing over field and
hedge and roof. They tossed their bushy heads beneath the clouds with a
wild, delighted shuffling of great boughs. With trunks upright they
raced leaping through the sky. There was upheaval and adventure in the
awful sound they made, and their cry was like the cry of a sea that has
broken through its gates and poured loose upon the world....

Through it all her husband slept peacefully as though he heard it not.
It was, as she well knew, the sleep of the semi-dead. For he was out
with all that clamoring turmoil. The part of him that she had lost was
there. The form that slept so calmly at her side was but the shell, half
emptied.

And when the winter's morning stole upon the scene at length, with a
pale, washed sunshine that followed the departing tempest, the first
thing she saw, as she crept to the window and looked out, was the ruined
cedar lying on the lawn. Only the gaunt and crippled trunk of it
remained. The single giant bough that had been left to it lay dark upon
the grass, sucked endways towards the Forest by a great wind eddy. It
lay there like a mass of drift-wood from a wreck, left by the ebbing of
a high spring-tide upon the sands--remnant of some friendly, splendid
vessel that once sheltered men.

And in the distance she heard the roaring of the Forest further out. Her
husband's voice was in it.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Man Whom the Trees Loved, by Algernon Blackwood

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MAN WHOM THE TREES LOVED ***

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