very opposite of anger, and that was more than he had a right to ask.
"Well, I was not so very delighted with it," said Felix, "but I would not say I was ever angry, no."
"There,s so much we can tell you," said Thibault, affectionately. "So many things we can explain - to you, and to Stuart, and to Laura."
And to Laura.
Felix looked at the dark window with its glittering sheet of sliding rain. His eyes moved over the elaborate ceiling with its varnished crisscross beams and those panels of painted sky with their gold stars.
And I know what he is feeling, thought Reuben, and he loves this house, loves it as he did when he built it, for surely he did build it, and he needs it, needs to come home to it now.
"And it would take years of nights such as this," Felix said, dreamily, "to tell you all we have to tell."
"I think it,s enough for now, for this first night, this remarkable night," said Thibault. "But remember, you were never in danger as we waited to play our hand."
"I understand that completely," said Reuben. There was more he wanted to say, especially now. So much more. But he was almost too dazzled to form words.
His many questions seemed insignificant as a vision of knowledge took form in his mind, vast, well beyond the arithmetical strictures of language, a great organic yet limitless vision that dissolved words. It was something infinitely more like music, expanding and rolling like the symphonic triumphs of Brahms. His heart was beating quietly to the mounting rhythm of his expectations, and a light was slowing breaking in on him, heated, incandescent, like the Shechinah, or the inevitable light of every dawn.
In his mind, he was back in the high forest canopy, a man wolf resting in the branches, seeing the stars again above him, and wondering once more if the great longing he felt was somehow a form of prayer. Why was that so important to him? Was that the only species of redemption he understood?
"It,s Margon who will counsel you," said Thibault. "It,s always best that Margon do the counseling. He is the very oldest of us all."
It sent a thrill through Reuben. And Margon, "the very oldest," was with the Boy Wolf right now. How different all this would be for Stuart who was so energetic and inquisitive by nature, how remarkably different from what it had been for Reuben stumbling from one discovery to another on his unlighted path.
"I,m tired now," said Felix, "and the sight of so much blood earlier has played upon my inveterate hunger."
"Oh, give it a rest!" said Thibault in a mock-scolding voice.
"You were born old," said Felix, gently nudging Thibault with his elbow again.
"Perhaps I was," said Thibault. "And it,s not a bad thing. I,ll take the offer of any bed in this house."
"I need the forest," said Felix. He looked at Laura. "My darling," he said, "would you allow me to take your young man away for just a little while, should he want to come?"
"Of course, go," she said earnestly. She clasped Reuben,s hand. "And what about Stuart?"
"They,re close," said Thibault. "I think Margon is deliberately exhausting him for his own good."
"There are reporters out there," said Reuben. "I can hear them. I,m sure you can too."
"And so can Margon," said Felix gently. "They,ll come through the tunnel or over the roof into the sanctum. You need not worry. You know that. You need not ever worry. We will never be seen."
Laura was on her feet and in Reuben,s arms. He felt the intense heat of her breasts against his shirtfront, his chest. He pressed his face against her tender neck.
Reuben didn,t have to tell her what this meant to him, to go out there into the divine leafy darkness with Felix, to go deep into the very heart of the night at Felix,s side.
"You come back to me soon," she whispered.
Thibault had come round to take her arm, to escort her, as it were, as if this had been a formal dinner in an earlier time, and they left the room together, Laura vaguely enchanted and Thibault doting as they disappeared into the hall.
Reuben looked at Felix.
Felix was again smiling at him, his face serene and full of compassion and a simple, effortless, and shining goodwill.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
THEY WENT DOWN through the cellar. All one had to do was swing back the heavy door to which the furnace was affixed above a