I
There
was a glow in the sky as if great furnace doors were opened.
But
all the afternoon his eyes had looked on glamour; he had strayed in fairyland.
The holidays were nearly done, and Lucian Taylor had gone out resolved to lose
himself, to discover strange hills and prospects that he had never seen before.
The air was still, breathless, exhausted after heavy rain, and the clouds
looked as if they had been molded of lead. No breeze blew upon the hill, and
down in the well of the valley not a dry leaf stirred, not a bough shook in all
the dark January woods.
About
a mile from the rectory he had diverged from the main road by an opening that
promised mystery and adventure. It was an old neglected lane, little more than
a ditch, worn ten feet deep by its winter waters, and shadowed by great
untrimmed hedges, densely woven together. On each side were turbid streams, and
here and there a torrent of water gushed down the banks, flooding the lane. It
was so deep and dark that he could not get a glimpse of the country through
which he was passing, but the way went down and down to some unconjectured
hollow.
Perhaps
he walked two miles between the high walls of the lane before its descent
ceased, but he thrilled with the sense of having journeyed very far, all the
long way from the know to the unknown. He had come as it were into the bottom
of a bowl amongst the hills, and black woods shut out the world. From the road
behind him, from the road before him, from the unseen wells beneath the trees,
rivulets of waters swelled and streamed down towards the center to the brook
that crossed the lane. Amid the dead and wearied silence of the air, beneath
leaden and motionless clouds, it was strange to hear such a tumult of gurgling
and rushing water, and he stood for a while on the quivering footbridge and
watched the rush of dead wood and torn branches and wisps of straw, all
hurrying madly past him, to plunge into the heaped spume, the barmy froth that
had gathered against a fallen tree.
Then
he climbed again, and went up between limestone rocks, higher and higher, till
the noise of waters became indistinct, a faint humming of swarming hives in
summer. He walked some distance on level ground, till there was a break in the
banks and a stile on which he could lean and look out. He found himself, as he
had hoped, afar and forlorn; he had strayed into outland and occult territory.
From the eminence of the lane, skirting the brow of a hill, he looked down into
deep valleys and dingles, and beyond, across the trees, to remoter country,
wild bare hills and dark wooded lands meeting the grey still sky. Immediately
beneath his feet the ground sloped steep down to the valley, a hillside of
close grass patched with dead bracken, and dotted here and there with stunted
thorns, and below there were deep oak woods, all still and silent, and lonely
as if no one ever passed that way. The grass and bracken and thorns and woods,
all were brown and grey beneath the leaden sky, and as Lucian looked he was
amazed, as though he were reading a wonderful story, the meaning of which was a
little greater than his understanding. Then, like the hero of a fairy-book, he
went on and on, catching now and again glimpses of the amazing country into
which he had penetrated, and perceiving rather than seeing that as the day
waned everything grew more grey and somber. As he advanced he heard the evening
sounds of the farms, the low of the cattle, and the barking of the sheepdogs; a
faint thin noise from far away. It was growing late, and as the shadows
blackened he walked faster, till once more the lane began to descend, there was
a sharp turn, and he found himself, with a good deal of relief, and a little
disappointment, on familiar ground. He had nearly described a circle, and knew
this end of the lane very well; it was not much more than a mile from home. He
walked smartly down the hill; the air was all glimmering and indistinct,
transmuting trees and hedges into ghostly shapes, and the walls of the White
House Farm flickered on the hillside, as if they were moving towards him. Then
a change came. First, a little breath of wind brushed with a dry whispering
sound through the hedges, the few leaves left on the boughs began to stir, and
one or two danced madly, and as the wind freshened and came up from a new
quarter, the sapless branches above rattled against one another like bones. The
growing breeze seemed to clear the air and lighten it. He was passing the stile
where a path led to old Mrs. Gibbon's desolate little cottage, in the middle of
the fields, at some distance even from the lane, and he saw the light blue
smoke of her chimney rise distinct above the gaunt greengage trees, against a
pale band that was broadening along the horizon. As he passed the stile with
his head bent, and his eyes on the ground, something white started out from the
black shadow of the hedge, and in the strange twilight, now tinged with a flush
from the west, a figure seemed to swim past him and disappear. For a moment he
wondered who it could be, the light was so flickering and unsteady, so unlike
the real atmosphere of the day, when he recollected it was only Annie Morgan,
old Morgan's daughter at the White House. She was three years older than he,
and it annoyed him to find that though she was only fifteen, there had been a
dreadful increase in her height since the summer holidays. He had got to the bottom
of the hill, and, lifting up his eyes, saw the strange changes of the sky. The
pale band had broadened into a clear vast space of light, and above, the heavy
leaden clouds were breaking apart and driving across the heaven before the
wind. He stopped to watch, and looked up at the great mound that jutted out
from the hills into mid-valley. It was a natural formation, and always it must
have had something of the form of a fort, but its steepness had been increased
by Roman art, and there were high banks on the summit which Lucian's father had
told him were the vallum of the camp, and a deep ditch had been dug to the
north to sever it from the hillside. On this summit oaks had grown, queer
stunted-looking trees with twisted and contorted trunks, and writhing branches;
and these now stood out black against the lighted sky. And then the air changed
once more; the flush increased, and a spot like blood appeared in the pond by
the gate, and all the clouds were touched with fiery spots and dapples of
flame; here and there it looked as if awful furnace doors were being opened.
The
wind blew wildly, and it came up through the woods with a noise like a scream,
and a great oak by the roadside ground its boughs together with a dismal
grating jar. As the red gained in the sky, the earth and all upon it glowed,
even the grey winter fields and the bare hillsides crimsoned, the waterpools
were cisterns of molten brass, and the very road glittered. He was
wonder-struck, almost aghast, before the scarlet magic of the afterglow. The
old Roman fort was invested with fire; flames from heaven were smitten about
its walls, and above there was a dark floating cloud, like fume of smoke, and
every haggard writhing tree showed as black as midnight against the black of
the furnace.
When
he got home he heard his mother's voice calling: "Here's Lucian at last.
Mary, Master Lucian has come, you can get the tea ready." He told a long
tale of his adventures, and felt somewhat mortified when his father seemed
perfectly acquainted with the whole course of the lane, and knew the names of
the wild woods through which he had passed in awe.
"You
must have gone by the Darren, I suppose" - that was all he said.
"Yes, I noticed the sunset; we shall have some stormy weather. I don't
expect to see many in church tomorrow."
There
was buttered toast for tea "because it was holidays." The red
curtains were drawn, and a bright fire was burning, and there was the old
familiar furniture, a little shabby, but charming from association. It was much
pleasanter than the cold and squalid schoolroom; and much better to be reading
Chambers's Journal than learning Euclid; and better to talk to his father and
mother than to be answering such remarks as: "I say, Taylor, I've torn my
trousers; how much to do you charge for mending?" "Lucy, dear, come
quick and sew this button on my shirt."
That
night the storm woke him, and he groped with his hands amongst the bedclothes,
and sat up, shuddering, not knowing where he was. He had seen himself, in a
dream, within the Roman fort, working some dark horror, and the furnace doors
were opened and a blast of flame from heaven was smitten upon him.
Lucian
went slowly, but not discreditably, up the school, gaining prizes now and
again, and falling in love more and more with useless reading and unlikely
knowledge. He did his elegiacs and iambics well enough, but he preferred
exercising himself in the rhymed Latin of the middle ages. He like history, but
he loved to meditate on a land laid waste, Britain deserted by the legions, the
rare pavements riven by frost, Celtic magic still brooding on the wild hills
and in the black depths of the forest, the rosy marbles stained with rain, and
the walls growing grey. The masters did not encourage these researches; a pure
enthusiasm, they felt, should be for cricket and football, the dilettanti might
even play fives and read Shakespeare without blame, but healthy English boys
should have nothing to do with decadent periods. He was once found guilty of
recommending Villon to a school-fellow named Barnes. Barnes tried to extract
unpleasantness from the text during preparation, and rioted in his place, owing
to his incapacity for the language. The matter was a serious one; the
headmaster had never heard of Villon, and the culprit gave up the name of his
literary admirer without remorse. Hence, sorrow for Lucian, and complete
immunity for the miserable illiterate Barnes, who resolved to confine his
researches to the Old Testament, a book which the headmaster knew well. As for
Lucian, he plodded on, learning his work decently, and sometimes doing very
creditable Latin and Greek prose. His school-fellows thought him quite mad, and
tolerated him, and indeed were very kind to him in their barbarous manner. He
often remembered in after life acts of generosity and good nature done by
wretches like Barnes, who had no care for old French nor for curious meters,
and such recollections always moved him to emotion. Travelers tell such tales;
cast upon cruel shores amongst savage races, they have found no little kindness
and warmth of hospitality.
He
looked forward to the holidays as joyfully as the rest of them. Barnes and his
friend Duscot used to tell him their plans and anticipation; they were going
home to brothers and sisters, and to cricket, more cricket, or to football,
more football, and in the winter there were parties and jollities of all sorts.
In return he would announce his intention of studying the Hebrew language, or
perhaps Provençal, with a walk up a bare and desolate mountain by way of
open-air amusement, and on a rainy day for choice. Whereupon Barnes would
impart to Duscot his confident belief that old Taylor was quite cracked. It was
a queer, funny life that of school, and so very unlike anything in Tom Brown.
He once saw the headmaster patting the head of the bishop's little boy, while
he called him "my little man," and smiled hideously. He told the tale
grotesquely in the lower fifth room the same day, and earned much applause, but
forfeited all liking directly by proposing a voluntary course of scholastic
logic. One barbarian threw him to the ground and another jumped on him, but it
was done very pleasantly. There were, indeed, some few of a worse class in the
school, solemn sycophants, prigs perfected from tender years, who thought life
already "serious," and yet, as the headmaster said, were
"joyous, manly young fellows." Some of these dressed for dinner at
home, and talked of dances when they came back in January. But this virulent
sort was comparatively infrequent, and achieved great success in after life.
Taking his school days as a whole, he always spoke up for the system, and years
afterward he described with enthusiasm the strong beer at a roadside tavern,
some way out of the town. But he always maintained that the taste for tobacco, acquired
in early life, was the great life, was the great note of the English Public
School.
Three
years after Lucian's discovery of the narrow lane and the vision of the flaming
fort, the August holidays brought him home at a time of great heat. It was one
of those memorable years of English weather, when some Provençal spell seems
wreathed round the island in the northern sea, and the grasshoppers chirp
loudly as the cicadas, the hills smell of rosemary, and white walls of the old
farmhouses blaze in the sunlight as if they stood in Arles or Avignon or famed
Tarascon by Rhone.
Lucian's
father was late at the station, and consequently Lucian bought the Confessions
of an English Opium Eater which he saw on the bookstall. When his father did
drive up, Lucian noticed that the old trap had had a new coat of dark paint,
and that the pony looked advanced in years.
"I
was afraid that I should be late, Lucian," said his father, "though I
made old Polly go like anything. I was just going to tell George to put her into
the trap when young Philip Harris came to me in a terrible state. He said his
father fell down 'all of a sudden like' in the middle of the field, and they
couldn't make him speak, and would I please to come and see him. So I had to
go, though I couldn't do anything for the poor fellow. They had sent for Dr.
Burrows, and I am afraid he will find it a bad case of sunstroke. The old
people say they never remember such a heat before."
The
pony jogged steadily along the burning turnpike road, taking revenge for the
hurrying on the way to the station. The hedges were white with the limestone
dust, and the vapor of heat palpitated over the fields. Lucian showed his
Confessions to his father, and began to talk of the beautiful bits he had
already found. Mr. Taylor knew the book well - had read it many years before.
Indeed he was almost as difficult to surprise as that character in Daudet, who
had one formula for all the chances of life, and when he saw the drowned
Academician dragged out of the river, merely observed "J'ai vu tout
ça." Mr. Taylor the parson, as his parishioners called him, had read the
fine books and loved the hills and woods, and now knew no more of pleasant or
sensational surprises. Indeed the living was much depreciated in value, and his
own private means were reduced almost to vanishing point, and under such
circumstances the great style loses many of its finer savors. He was very fond
of Lucian, and cheered by his return, but in the evening he would be a sad man
again, with his head resting on one hand, and eyes reproaching sorry fortune.
Nobody
called out "Here's your master with Master Lucian; you can get tea
ready," when the pony jogged up to the front door. His mother had been
dead a year, and a cousin kept house. She was a respectable person called
Deacon, of middle age, and ordinary standards; and, consequently, there was
cold mutton on the table. There was a cake, but nothing of flour, baked in
ovens, would rise at Miss Deacon's evocation. Still, the meal was laid in the
beloved "parlor," with the view of hills and valleys and climbing
woods from the open window, and the old furniture was still pleasant to see,
and the old books in the shelves had many memories. One of the most respected
of the armchairs had become weak in the castors and had to be artfully propped
up, but Lucian found it very comfortable after the hard forms. When tea was
over he went out and strolled in the garden and orchards, and looked over the
stile down into the brake, where foxgloves and bracken and broom mingled with
the hazel undergrowth, where he knew of secret glades and untracked recesses,
deep in the woven green, the cabinets for many years of his lonely meditations.
Every path about his home, every field and hedgerow had dear and friendly
memories for him; and the odor of the meadowsweet was better than the incense
steaming in the sunshine. He loitered, and hung over the stile till the far-off
woods began to turn purple, till the white mists were wreathing in the valley.
Day
after day, through all that August, morning and evening were wrapped in haze;
day after day the earth shimmered in the heat, and the air was strange,
unfamiliar. As he wandered in the lanes and sauntered by the cool sweet verge
of the woods, he saw and felt that nothing was common or accustomed, for the
sunlight transfigured the meadows and changed all the form of the earth. Under
the violent Provençal sun, the elms and beeches looked exotic trees, and in the
early morning, when the mists were thick, the hills had put on an unearthly
shape.
The
one adventure of the holidays was the visit to the Roman fort, to that
fantastic hill about whose steep bastions and haggard oaks he had seen the
flames of sunset writhing nearly three years before. Ever since that Saturday
evening in January, the lonely valley had been a desirable place to him; he had
watched the green battlements in summer and winter weather, had seen the heaped
mounds rising dimly amidst the drifting rain, had marked the violent height
swim up from the ice-white bulwarks glimmer and vanish in hovering April
twilight. In the hedge of the lane there was a gate on which he used to lean
and look down south to where the hill surged up so suddenly, its summit defined
on summer evenings not only by the rounded ramparts but by the ring of dense
green foliage that marked the circle of oak trees. Higher up the lane, on the
way he had come that Saturday afternoon, one could see the white walls of
Morgan's farm on the hillside to the north, and on the south there was the
stile with the view of old Mrs. Gibbon's cottage smoke; but down in the hollow,
looking over the gate, there was no hint of human work, except those green and
antique battlements, on which the oaks stood in circle, guarding the inner
wood.
The
ring of the fort drew him with stronger fascination during that hot August
weather. Standing, or as his headmaster would have said, "mooning" by
the gate, and looking into that enclosed and secret valley, it seemed to his
fancy as if there were a halo about the hill, an aureole that played like flame
around it. One afternoon as he gazed from his station by the gate the sheer
sides and the swelling bulwarks were more than ever things of enchantment; the
green oak ring stood out against the sky as still and bright as in a picture,
and Lucian, in spite of his respect for the law of trespass, slid over the
gate. The farmers and their men were busy on the uplands with the harvest, and
the adventure was irresistible. At first he stole along by the brook in the
shadow of the alders, where the grass and the flowers of wet meadows grew
richly; but as he drew nearer to the fort, and its height now rose sheer above
him, he left all shelter, and began desperately to mount. There was not a
breath of wind; the sunlight shone down on the bare hillside; the loud chirp of
the grasshoppers was the only sound. It was a steep ascent and grew steeper as
the valley sank away. He turned for a moment, and looked down towards the
stream which now seemed to wind remote between the alders; above the valley
there were small dark figures moving in the cornfield, and now and again there
came the faint echo of a high-pitched voice singing through the air as on a
wire. He was wet with heat; the sweat streamed off his face, and he could feel
it trickling all over his body. But above him the green bastions rose defiant,
and the dark ring of oaks promised coolness. He pressed on, and higher, and at
last began to crawl up the vallum, on hands and knees, grasping the turf and
here and there the roots that had burst through the red earth. And then he lay,
panting with deep breaths, on the summit.
Within
the fort it was all dusky and cool and hollow; it was as if one stood at the
bottom of a great cup. Within, the wall seemed higher than without, and the
ring of oaks curved up like a dark green vault. There were nettles growing
thick and rank in the foss; they looked different from the common nettles in
the lanes, and Lucian, letting his hand touch a leaf by accident, felt the
sting burn like fire. Beyond the ditch there was an undergrowth, a dense
thicket of trees, stunted and old, crooked and withered by the winds into
awkward and ugly forms; beech and oak and hazel and ash and yew twisted and so
shortened and deformed that each seemed, like the nettle, of no common kind. He
began to fight his way through the ugly growth, stumbling and getting hard
knocks from the rebound of twisted boughs. His foot struck once or twice
against something harder than wood, and looking down he saw stones white with
the leprosy of age, but still showing the work of the axe. And farther, the
roots of the stunted trees gripped the foot-high relics of a wall; and a round
heap of fallen stones nourished rank, unknown herbs, that smelt poisonous. The
earth was black and unctuous, and bubbling under the feet, left no track
behind. From it, in the darkest places where the shadow was thickest, swelled
the growth of an abominable fungus, making the still air sick with its corrupt
odor, and he shuddered as he felt the horrible thing pulped beneath his feet.
Then there was a gleam of sunlight, and as he thrust the last boughs apart, he
stumbled into the open space in the heart of the camp. It was a lawn of sweet
close turf in the center of the matted brake, of clean firm earth from which no
shameful growth sprouted, and near the middle of the glade was a stump of a
felled yew-tree, left untrimmed by the woodman. Lucian thought it must have
been made for a seat; a crooked bough through which a little sap still ran was
a support for the back, and he sat down and rested after his toil. It was not
really so comfortable a seat as one of the school forms, but the satisfaction
was to find anything at all that would serve for a chair. He sat there, still
panting after the climb and his struggle through the dank and jungle-like thicket,
and he felt as if he were growing hotter and hotter; the sting of the nettle
was burning his hand, and the tingling fire seemed to spread all over his body.
Suddenly,
he knew that he was alone. Not merely solitary; that he had often been amongst
the woods and deep in the lanes; but now it was a wholly different and a very
strange sensation. He thought of the valley winding far below him, all its
fields by the brook green and peaceful and still, without path or track. Then
he had climbed the abrupt surge of the hill, and passing the green and swelling
battlements, the ring of oaks, and the matted thicket, had come to the central
space. And behind there were, he knew, many desolate fields, wild as common,
untrodden, unvisited. He was utterly alone. He still grew hotter as he sat on
the stump, and at last lay down at full length on the soft grass, and more at
his ease felt the waves of heat pass over his body.
And
then he began to dream, to let his fancies stray over half-imagined, delicious
things, indulging a virgin mind in its wanderings. The hot air seemed to beat
upon him in palpable waves, and the nettle sting tingled and itched
intolerably; and he was alone upon the fairy hill, within the great mounds,
within the ring of oaks, deep in the heart of the matted thicket. Slowly and
timidly he began to untie his boots, fumbling with the laces, and glancing all
the while on every side at the ugly misshapen trees that hedged the lawn. Not a
branch was straight, not one was free, but all were interlaced and grew one
about another; and just above ground, where the cankered stems joined the
protuberant roots, there were forms that imitated the human shape, and faces
and twining limbs that amazed him. Green mosses were hair, and tresses were
stark in grey lichen; a twisted root swelled into a limb; in the hollows of the
rotted bark he saw the masks of men. His eyes were fixed and fascinated by the
simulacra of the wood, and could not see his hands, and so at last, and
suddenly, it seemed, he lay in the sunlight, beautiful with his olive skin,
dark haired, dark eyed, the gleaming bodily vision of a strayed faun.
Quick
flames now quivered in the substance of his nerves, hints of mysteries, secrets
of life passed trembling through his brain, unknown desires stung him. As he
gazed across the turf and into the thicket, the sunshine seemed really to
become green, and the contrast between the bright glow poured on the lawn and
the black shadow of the brake made an odd flickering light, in which all the
grotesque postures of stem and root began to stir; the wood was alive. The turf
beneath him heaved and sank as with the deep swell of the sea. He fell asleep,
and lay still on the grass, in the midst of the thicket.
He
found out afterwards that he must have slept for nearly an hour. The shadows
had changed when he awoke; his senses came to him with a sudden shock, and he
sat up and stared at his bare limbs in stupid amazement. He huddled on his
clothes and laced his boots, wondering what folly had beset him. Then, while he
stood indecisive, hesitating, his brain a whirl of puzzled thought, his body
trembling, his hands shaking; as with electric heat, sudden remembrance
possessed him. A flaming blush shone red on his cheeks, and glowed and thrilled
through his limbs. As he awoke, a brief and slight breeze had stirred in a nook
of the matted boughs, and there was a glinting that might have been the flash
of sudden sunlight across shadow, and the branches rustled and murmured for a
moment, perhaps at the wind's passage.
He
stretched out his hands, and cried to his visitant to return; he entreated the
dark eyes that had shone over him, and the scarlet lips that had kissed him.
And then panic fear rushed into his heart, and he ran blindly, dashing through
the wood. He climbed the vallum, and looked out, crouching, lest anybody should
see him. Only the shadows were changed, and a breath of cooler air mounted from
the brook; the fields were still and peaceful, the black figures moved, far
away, amidst the corn, and the faint echo of the high-pitched voices sang thin
and distant on the evening wind. Across the stream, in the cleft on the hill,
opposite to the fort, the blue wood smoke stole up a spiral pillar from the
chimney of old Mrs. Gibbon's cottage. He began to run full tilt down the steep
surge of the hill, and never stopped till he was over the gate and in the lane
again. As he looked back, down the valley to the south, and saw the violent
ascent, the green swelling bulwarks, and the dark ring of oaks; the sunlight
seemed to play about the fort with an aureole of flame.
"Where
on earth have you been all this time, Lucian?" said his cousin when he got
home. "Why, you look quite ill. It is really madness of you to go walking
in such weather as this. I wonder you haven't got a sunstroke. And the tea must
be nearly cold. I couldn't keep your father waiting, you know."
He
muttered something about being rather tired, and sat down to his tea. It was
not cold, for the "cozy" had been put over the pot, but it was black
and bitter strong, as his cousin expressed it. The draught was unpalatable, but
it did him good, and the thought came with great consolation that he had only
been asleep and dreaming queer, nightmarish dreams. He shook off all his
fancies with resolution, and thought the loneliness of the camp, and the
burning sunlight, and possibly the nettle sting, which still tingled most
abominably, must have been the only factors in his farrago of impossible
recollections. He remembered that when he had felt the sting, he had seized a
nettle with thick folds of his handkerchief, and having twisted off a good
length, and put it in his pocket to show his father. Mr. Taylor was almost
interested when he came in from his evening stroll about the garden and saw the
specimen.
"Where
did you manage to come across that, Lucian?" he said. "You haven't
been to Caermaen, have you?"
"No.
I got it in the Roman fort by the common."
"Oh,
the twyn. You must have been trespassing then. Do you know what it is?"
"No.
I thought it looked different from the common nettles."
"Yes;
it's a Roman nettle - arctic pilulifera. It's a rare plant. Burrows says it's
to be found at Caermaen, but I was never able to come across it. I must add it
to the flora of the parish."
Mr.
Taylor had begun to compile a flora accompanied by a hortus siccus, but both
stayed on high shelves dusty and fragmentary. He put the specimen on his desk,
intending to fasten it in the book, but the maid swept it away, dry and
withered, in a day or two.
Lucian
tossed and cried out in his sleep that night, and the awakening in the morning
was, in a measure, a renewal of the awakening in the fort. But the impression
was not so strong, and in a plain room it seemed all delirium, a
phantasmagoria. He had to go down to Caermaen in the afternoon, for Mrs. Dixon,
the vicar's wife, had "commanded" his presence at tea. Mr. Dixon,
though fat and short and clean shaven, ruddy of face, was a safe man, with no
extreme views on anything. He "deplored" all extreme party
convictions, and thought the great needs of our beloved Church were
conciliation, moderation, and above all "amolgamation" - so he
pronounced the word. Mrs. Dixon was tall, imposing, splendid, well fitted for
the Episcopal order, with gifts that would have shone at the palace. There were
daughters, who studied German Literature, and thought Miss Frances Ridley
Havergal wrote poetry, but Lucian had no fear of them; he dreaded the boys.
Everybody said they were such fine, manly fellows, such gentlemanly boys, with
such a good manner, sure to get on in the world. Lucian had said
"Bother!" in a very violent manner when the gracious invitation was
conveyed to him, but there was no getting out of it. Miss Deacon did her best
to make him look smart; his ties were all so disgraceful that she had to supply
the want with a narrow ribbon of a sky-blue tint; and she brushed him so long
and so violently that he quite understood why a horse sometimes bites and
sometimes kicks the groom. He set out between two and three in a gloomy frame
of mind; he knew too well what spending the afternoon with honest manly boys
meant. He found the reality more lurid than his anticipation. The boys were in
the field, and the first remark he heard when he got in sight of the group was:
"Hullo,
Lucian, how much for the tie?" "Fine tie," another, a stranger,
observed. "You bagged it from the kitten, didn't you?"
Then
they made up a game of cricket, and he was put in first. He was l.b.w. in his
second over, so they all said, and had to field for the rest of the afternoon.
Arthur Dixon, who was about his own age, forgetting all the laws of
hospitality, told him he was a beastly muff when he missed a catch, rather a
difficult catch. He missed several catches, and it seemed as if he were always
panting after balls, which, as Edward Dixon said, any fool, even a baby, could
have stopped. At last the game broke up, solely from Lucian's lack of skill, as
everybody declared. Edward Dixon, who was thirteen, and had a swollen red face
and a projecting eye, wanted to fight him for spoiling the game, and the others
agreed that he funked the fight in a rather dirty manner. The strange boy, who
was called De Carti, and was understood to be faintly related to Lord De Carti
of M'Carthytown, said openly that the fellows at his place wouldn't stand such
a sneak for five minutes. So the afternoon passed off very pleasantly indeed,
till it was time to go into the vicarage for weak tea, homemade cake, and
unripe plums. He got away at last. As he went out at the gate, he heard De
Carti's final observation:
"We
like to dress well at our place. His governor must be beastly poor to let him
go about like that. D'y' see his trousers are all ragged at heel? Is old Taylor
a gentleman?"
It
had been a very gentlemanly afternoon, but there was a certain relief when the
vicarage was far behind, and the evening smoke of the little town, once the
glorious capital of Siluria, hung haze-like over the ragged roofs and mingled
with the river mist. He looked down from the height of the road on the huddled
houses, saw the points of light start out suddenly from the cottages on the
hillside beyond, and gazed at the long lovely valley fading in the twilight,
till the darkness came and all that remained was the somber ridge of the
forest. The way was pleasant through the solemn scented lane, with glimpses of
dim country, the vague mystery of night overshadowing the woods and meadows. A
warm wind blew gusts of odor from the meadowsweet by the brook, now and then
bee and beetle span homeward through the air, booming a deep note as from a
great organ far away, and from the verge of the wood came the "who-oo,
who-oo, who-oo" of the owls, a wild strange sound that mingled with the
whirr and rattle of the night-jar, deep in the bracken. The moon swam up
through the films of misty cloud, and hung, a golden glorious lantern, in
mid-air; and, set in the dusky hedge, the little green fires of the glowworms
appeared. He sauntered slowly up the lane, drinking in the religion of the
scene, and thinking the country by night as mystic and wonderful as a dimly-lit
cathedral. He had quite forgotten the "manly young fellows" and their
sports, and only wished as the land began to shimmer and gleam in the moonlight
that he knew by some medium of words or color how to represent the loveliness
about his way.
"Had
a pleasant evening, Lucian?" said his father when he came in.
"Yes,
I had a nice walk home. Oh, in the afternoon we played cricket. I didn't care
for it much. There was a boy named De Carti there; he is staying with the
Dixons. Mrs. Dixon whispered to me when we were going in to tea, 'He's a second
cousin of Lord De Carti's,' and she looked quite grave as if she were in
church."
The
parson grinned grimly and lit his old pipe.
"Baron
De Carti's great-grandfather was a Dublin attorney," he remarked.
"Which his name was Jeremiah M'Carthy. His prejudiced fellow-citizens
called him the Unjust Steward, also the Bloody Attorney, and I believe that 'to
hell with M'Carthy' was quite a popular cry about the time of the Union."
Mr.
Taylor was a man of very wide and irregular reading and a tenacious memory; he
often used to wonder why he had not risen in the Church. He had once told Mr.
Dixon a singular and drolatique anecdote concerning the bishop's college days,
and he never discovered why the prelate did not bow according to his custom
when the name of Taylor was called at the next visitation. Some people said the
reason was lighted candles, but that was impossible, as the Reverend and
Honorable Smallwood Stafford, Lord Beamys's son, who had a cure of souls in the
cathedral city, was well known to burn no end of candles, and with him the
bishop was on the best of terms. Indeed the bishop often stayed at Coplesey
(pronounced "Copsey") Hall, Lord Beamys's place in the west.
Lucian
had mentioned the name of De Carti with intention, and had perhaps exaggerated
a little Mrs. Dixon's respectful manner. He knew such incidents cheered his
father, who could never look at these subjects from a proper point of view,
and, as people said, sometimes made the strangest remarks for a clergyman. This
irreverent way of treating serious things was one of the great bonds between
father and son, but it tended to increase their isolation. People said they
would often have liked to asked Mr. Taylor to garden-parties, and tea-parties,
and other cheap entertainments, if only he had not been such an extreme man and
so queer. Indeed, a year before, Mr. Taylor had gone to a garden-party at the
Castle, Caermaen, and had made such fun of the bishop's recent address on
missions to the Portuguese, that the Gervases and Dixons and all who heard him
were quite shocked and annoyed. And, as Mrs. Meyrick of Lanyravon observed, his
black coat was perfectly green with age; so on the whole the Gervases did not
like to invite Mr. Taylor again. As for the son, nobody cared to have him; Mrs.
Dixon, as she said to her husband, really asked him out of charity.
"I
am afraid he seldom gets a real meal at home," she remarked, "so I
thought he would enjoy a good wholesome tea for once in a way. But he is such
an unsatisfactory boy, he would only have one slice of that nice plain cake,
and I couldn't get him to take more than two plums. They were really quite ripe
too, and boys are usually so fond of fruit."
Thus
Lucian was forced to spend his holidays chiefly in his own company, and make
the best he could of the ripe peaches on the south wall of the rectory garden.
There was a certain corner where the heat of that hot August seemed
concentrated, reverberated from one wall to the other, and here he liked to
linger of mornings, when the mists were still thick in the valleys,
"mooning," meditating, extending his walk from the quince to the
medlar and back again, beside the moldering walls of mellowed brick. He was
full of a certain wonder and awe, not unmixed with a swell of strange
exultation, and wished more and more to be alone, to think over that wonderful
afternoon within the fort. In spite of himself the impression was fading; he
could not understand that feeling of mad panic terror that drove him through
the thicket and down the steep hillside; yet, he had experienced so clearly the
physical shame and reluctance of the flesh; he recollected that for a few
seconds after his awakening the sight of his own body had made him shudder and
writhe as if it had suffered some profoundest degradation. He saw before him a
vision of two forms; a faun with tingling and prickling flesh lay expectant in
the sunlight, and there was also the likeness of a miserable shamed boy,
standing with trembling body and shaking, unsteady hands. It was all confused,
a procession of blurred images, now of rapture and ecstasy, and now of terror
and shame, floating in a light that was altogether phantasmal and unreal. He
dared not approach the fort again; he lingered in the road to Caermaen that
passed behind it, but a mile away, and separated by the wild land and a strip
of wood from the towering battlements. Here he was looking over a gate one day,
doubtful and wondering, when he heard a heavy step behind him, and glancing
round quickly saw it was old Morgan of the White House.
"Good
afternoon, Master Lucian," he began. "Mr. Taylor pretty well, I
suppose? I be goin' to the house a minute; the men in the fields are wantin'
some more cider. Would you come and taste a drop of cider, Master Lucian? It's
very good, sir, indeed."
Lucian
did not want any cider, but he thought it would please old Morgan if he took
some, so he said he should like to taste the cider very much indeed. Morgan was
a sturdy, thick-set old man of the ancient stock; a stiff churchman, who
breakfasted regularly on fat broth and Caerphilly cheese in the fashion of his
ancestors; hot, spiced elder wine was for winter nights, and gin for festal
seasons. The farm had always been the freehold of the family, and when Lucian, in
the wake of the yeoman, passed through the deep porch by the oaken door, down
into the long dark kitchen, he felt as though the seventeenth century still
lingered on. One mullioned window, set deep in the sloping wall, gave all the
light there was through quarries of thick glass in which there were whorls and
circles, so that the lapping rose-branch and the garden and the fields beyond
were distorted to the sight. Two heavy beams, oaken but whitewashed, ran across
the ceiling; a little glow of fire sparkled in the great fireplace, and a curl
of blue smoke fled up the cavern of the chimney. Here was the genuine
chimney-corner of our fathers; there were seats on each side of the fireplace
where one could sit snug and sheltered on December nights, warm and merry in
the blazing light, and listen to the battle of the storm, and hear the flame
spit and hiss at the falling snowflakes. At the back of the fire were great
blackened tiles with raised initials and a date. - I.M., 1684.
"Sit
down, Master Lucian, sit down, sir," said Morgan.
"Annie,"
he called through one of the numerous doors, "here's Master Lucian, the
parson, would like a drop of cider. Fetch a jug, will you, directly?"
"Very
well, father," came the voice from the dairy and presently the girl entered,
wiping the jug she held. In his boyish way Lucian had been a good deal
disturbed by Annie Morgan; he could see her on Sundays from his seat in church,
and her skin, curiously pale, her lips that seemed as though they were stained
with some brilliant pigment, her black hair, and the quivering black eyes, gave
him odd fancies which he had hardly shaped to himself. Annie had grown into a
woman in three years, and he was still a boy. She came into the kitchen,
curtsying and smiling.
"Good-day,
Master Lucian, and how is Mr. Taylor, sir?"
"Pretty
well, thank you. I hope you are well."
"Nicely,
sir, thank you. How nice your voice do sound in church, Master Lucian, to be
sure. I was telling father about it last Sunday."
Lucian
grinned and felt uncomfortable, and the girl set down the jug on the round
table and brought a glass from the dresser. She bent close over him as she
poured out the green oily cider, fragrant of the orchard; her hand touched his
shoulder for a moment, and she said, "I beg your pardon, sir," very
prettily. He looked up eagerly at her face; the black eyes, a little oval in
shape, were shining, and the lips smiled. Annie wore a plain dress of some
black stuff, open at the throat; her skin was beautiful. For a moment the ghost
of a fancy hovered unsubstantial in his mind; and then Annie curtsied as she
handed him the cider, and replied to his thanks with, "And welcome kindly,
sir."
The
drink was really good; not thin, nor sweet, but round and full and generous,
with a fine yellow flame twinkling through the green when one held it up to the
light. It was like a stray sunbeam hovering on the grass in a deep orchard, and
he swallowed the glassful with relish, and had some more, warmly commending it.
Mr. Morgan was touched.
"I
see you do know a good thing, sir," he said. "Is, indeed, now, it's
good stuff, though it's my own makin'. My old grandfather he planted the trees
in the time of the wars, and he was a very good judge of an apple in his day
and generation. And a famous grafter he was, to be sure. You will never see no
swelling in the trees he grafted at all whatever. Now there's James Morris,
Penyrhaul, he's a famous grafter, too, and yet them Redstreaks he grafted for
me five year ago, they be all swollen-like below the graft already. Would you
like to taste a Blemmin pippin, now, Master Lucian? there be a few left in the
loft, I believe."
Lucian
said he should like an apple very much, and the farmer went out by another
door, and Annie stayed in the kitchen talking. She said Mrs. Trevor, her
married sister, was coming to them soon to spend a few days.
"She's
got such a beautiful baby," said Annie, "and he's quite sensible-like
already, though he's only nine months old. Mary would like to see you, sir, if
you would be so kind as to step in; that is, if it's not troubling you at all,
Master Lucian. I suppose you must be getting a fine scholar now, sir?"
"I
am doing pretty well, thank you," said the boy. "I was first in my
form last term."
"Fancy!
To think of that! D'you hear, father, what a scholar Master Lucian be
getting?"
"He
be a rare grammarian, I'm sure," said the farmer. "You do take after
your father, sir; I always do say that nobody have got such a good deliverance
in the pulpit."
Lucian
did not find the Blenheim Orange as good as the cider, but he ate it with all
the appearance of relish, and put another, with thanks, in his pocket. He
thanked the farmer again when he got up to go; and Annie curtsied and smiled,
and wished him good-day, and welcome, kindly.
Lucian
heard her saying to her father as he went out what a nice-mannered young
gentleman he was getting, to be sure; and he went on his way, thinking that
Annie was really very pretty, and speculating as to whether he would have the
courage to kiss her, if they met in a dark lane. He was quite sure she would
only laugh, and say, "Oh, Master Lucian!"
For
many months he had occasional fits of recollection, both cold and hot; but the
bridge of time, gradually lengthening, made those dreadful and delicious images
grow more and more indistinct, till at last they all passed into that
wonderland which a youth looks back upon in amazement, not knowing why this
used to be a symbol of terror or that of joy. At the end of each term he would
come home and find his father a little more despondent, and harder to cheer
even for a moment; and the wall paper and the furniture grew more and more
dingy and shabby. The two cats, loved and ancient beasts, that he remembered
when he was quite a little boy, before he went to school, died miserably, one
after the other. Old Polly, the pony, at last fell down in the stable from the
weakness of old age, and had to be killed there; the battered old trap ran no
longer along the well-remembered lanes. There was long meadow grass on the
lawn, and the trained fruit trees on the wall had got quite out of hand. At
last, when Lucian was seventeen, his father was obliged to take him from
school; he could no longer afford the fees. This was the sorry ending of many
hopes, and dreams of a double-first, a fellowship, distinction and glory that
the poor parson had long entertained for his son, and the two moped together,
in the shabby room, one on each side of the sulky fire, thinking of dead days
and finished plans, and seeing a grey future in the years that advanced towards
them. At one time there seemed some chance of a distant relative coming forward
to Lucian's assistance; and indeed it was quite settled that he should go up to
London with certain definite aims. Mr. Taylor told the good news to his
acquaintances - his coat was too green now for any pretence of friendship; and
Lucian himself spoke of his plans to Burrows the doctor and Mr. Dixon, and one
or two others. Then the whole scheme fell through, and the parson and his son
suffered much sympathy. People, of course, had to say they were sorry, but in
reality the news was received with high spirits, with the joy with which one
sees a stone, as it rolls down a steep place, give yet another bounding leap
towards the pool beneath. Mrs. Dixon heard the pleasant tidings from Mrs.
Colley, who came in to talk about the Mothers' Meeting and the Band of Hope.
Mrs. Dixon was nursing little Athelwig, or some such name, at the time, and
made many affecting observations on the general righteousness with which the
world was governed. Indeed, poor Lucian's disappointment seemed distinctly to
increase her faith in the Divine Order, as if it had been some example in
Butler's Analogy.
"Aren't
Mr. Taylor's views very extreme?" she said to her husband the same
evening.
"I
am afraid they are," he replied. "I was quite grieved at the last
Diocesan Conference at the way in which he spoke. The dear old bishop had given
an address on Auricular Confession; he was forced to do so, you know, after
what had happened, and I must say that I never felt prouder of our beloved
Church."
Mr.
Dixon told all the Homeric story of the conference, reciting the achievements
of the champions, "deploring" this and applauding that. It seemed
that Mr. Taylor had had the audacity to quote authorities which the bishop
could not very well repudiate, though they were directly opposed to the
"safe" Episcopal pronouncement.
Mrs.
Dixon of course was grieved; it was "sad" to think of a clergyman
behaving so shamefully.
"But
you know, dear," she proceeded, "I have been thinking about that
unfortunate Taylor boy and his disappointments, and after what you've just told
me, I am sure it's some kind of judgment on them both. Has Mr. Taylor forgotten
the vows he took at his ordination? But don't you think, dear, I am right, and
that he has been punished: 'The sins of the fathers'?"
Somehow
or other Lucian divined the atmosphere of threatenings and judgments, and
shrank more and more from the small society of the countryside. For his part,
when he was not "mooning" in the beloved fields and woods of happy
memory, he shut himself up with books, reading whatever could be found on the
shelves, and amassing a store of incongruous and obsolete knowledge. Long did
he linger with the men of the seventeenth century; delaying the gay sunlit
streets with Pepys, and listening to the charmed sound of the Restoration
Revel; roaming by peaceful streams with Izaak Walton, and the great Catholic
divines; enchanted with the portrait of Herber the loving ascetic; awed by the
mystic breath of Crashaw. Then the cavalier poets sang their gallant songs; and
Herrick made Dean Prior magic ground by the holy incantation of a verse. And in
the old proverbs and homely sayings of the time he found the good and beautiful
English life, a time full of grace and dignity and rich merriment. He dived
deeper and deeper into his books; he had taken all obsolescence to be his
province; in his disgust at the stupid usual questions, "Will it
pay?" "What good is it?" and so forth, he would only read what
was uncouth and useless. The strange pomp and symbolism of the Cabala, with its
hint of more terrible things; the Rosicrucian mysteries of Fludd, the enigmas
of Vaughan, dreams of alchemists - all these were his delight. Such were his
companions, with the hills and hanging woods, the brooks and lonely waterpools;
books, the thoughts of books, the stirrings of imagination, all fused into one
phantasy by the magic of the outland country. He held himself aloof from the
walls of the fort; he was content to see the heaped mounds, the violent height
with faerie bulwarks, from the gate in the lane, and to leave all within the
ring of oaks in the mystery of his boyhood's vision. He professed to laugh at
himself and at his fancies of that hot August afternoon, when sleep came to him
within the thicket, but in his heart of hearts there was something that never
faded - something that glowed like the red glint of a gypsy's fire seen from
afar across the hills and mists of the night, and known to be burning in a wild
land. Sometimes, when he was sunken in his books, the flame of delight shot up,
and showed him a whole province and continent of his nature, all shining and
aglow; and in the midst of the exultation and triumph he would draw back, a
little afraid. He had become ascetic in his studious and melancholy isolation,
and the vision of such ecstasies frightened him. He began to write a little; at
first very tentatively and feebly, and then with more confidence. He showed
some of his verses to his father, who told him with a sigh that he had once
hoped to write - in the old days at Oxford, he added.
"They
are very nicely done," said the parson; "but I'm afraid you won't
find anybody to print them, my boy."
So
he pottered on; reading everything, imitating what struck his fancy, attempting
the effect of the classic meters in English verse, trying his hand at a masque,
a Restoration comedy, forming impossible plans for books which rarely got
beyond half a dozen lines on a sheet of paper; beset with splendid fancies
which refused to abide before the pen. But the vain joy of conception was not
altogether vain, for it gave him some armor about his heart.
The
months went by, monotonous, and sometimes blotted with despair. He wrote and
planned and filled the waste-paper basket with hopeless efforts. Now and then
he sent verses or prose articles to magazines, in pathetic ignorance of the
trade. He felt the immense difficulty of the career of literature without
clearly understanding it; the battle was happily in a mist, so that the host of
the enemy, terribly arrayed, was to some extent hidden. Yet there was enough of
difficulty to appall; from following the intricate course of little nameless
brooks, from hushed twilight woods, from the vision of the mountains, and the
breath of the great wind, passing from deep to deep, he would come home filled
with thoughts and emotions, mystic fancies which he yearned to translate into
the written word. And the result of the effort seemed always to be bathos!
Wooden sentences, a portentous stilted style, obscurity, and awkwardness
clogged the pen; it seemed impossible to win the great secret of language; the
stars glittered only in the darkness, and vanished away in clearer light. The
periods of despair were often long and heavy, the victories very few and
trifling; night after night he sat writing after his father had knocked out his
last pipe, filling a page with difficulty in an hour, and usually forced to
thrust the stuff away in despair, and go unhappily to bed, conscious that after
all his labor he had done nothing. And these were moments when the accustomed
vision of the land alarmed him, and the wild domed hills and darkling woods
seemed symbols of some terrible secret in the inner life of that stranger -
himself. Sometimes when he was deep in his books and papers, sometimes on a
lonely walk, sometimes amidst the tiresome chatter of Caermaen
"society," he would thrill with a sudden sense of awful hidden
things, and there ran that quivering flame through his nerves that brought back
the recollection of the matted thicket, and that earlier appearance of the bare
black boughs enwrapped with flames. Indeed, though he avoided the solitary
lane, and the sight of the sheer height, with its ring of oaks and molded
mounds, the image of it grew more intense as the symbol of certain hints and
suggestions. The exultant and insurgent flesh seemed to have its temple and
castle within those olden walls, and he longed with all his heart to escape, to
set himself free in the wilderness of London, and to be secure amidst the
murmur of modern streets.
