Wood and Stone (24 page)

Lacrima was calm and self-contained, but she ate hardly anything; and the hand with which she raised her glass to her lips trembled in spite of all her efforts.

Gladys herself was exuberant with suppressed excitement. Every now and then she glanced
furtively
at the window, and at other times, when there was no reason for such an outburst, she gave vent to a low feline laugh. She was of the type of animal that the approach of thunder, and the presence of
electricity
in the air, fills with magnetic nervous exaltation.

The meal was over at last, and the various persons of the group hastened to separate, each of them weighed upon, as if by an atmospheric hand, with the burden of their own purposes and apprehensions.

The two girls retired to their rooms. Mrs. Romer retreated to her favourite corner in the entrance hall, and then, uneasy even here, took refuge in the
assuaging
society of her friend the housekeeper.

Romer himself marched away gloomily to his study; and Dangelis, snatching up his coat and hat, made off across the south garden.

It did not take the American long to reach the low hedge which separated Mr. Quincunx’s garden from the lane. The recluse was awaiting him, and joined him at once at the gate, giving him no
invitation
to enter, and taking for granted that their
conversation
was to be a pedestrian one.

Mr. Quincunx experienced a curious reluctance to allow any of his friends to cross his threshold. The only one completely privileged in this matter was young Luke Andersen, whose gay urbanity was so insidious that it would have overcome the resistance of a Trappist monk.

“Well, where are you proposing to take me
tonight
?” enquired Dangelis, when they had advanced in silence some distance up the hill.

“To a place that will interest you, if your damned artistic tastes haven’t quite spoiled your pleasure in little things!”

“Not to the Seven Ashes again?” protested the American. “I know this lane leads up there.”

“You wait a little. We shall turn off presently,” muttered his companion. “The truth is I am taking you on a sort of scouting expedition tonight.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“Well—if you must know, you shall know! I saw Miss Traffio yesterday and she asked me to keep an eye on Auber Lake tonight.”

“What? That place they were talking of? Where the wild-geese are?”

Mr. Quincunx nodded. “It may, for all I know,
be a wild-goose chase. But I find your friend Gladys is up to her little tricks again—frightening people and upsetting their minds. And I promised Lacrima that you and I would stroll round that way—just to see that the girls don’t come to any harm. Only we mustn’t let them know we’re there. Lacrima would never forgive me if Gladys saw us.”

“Do you mean to say that those two children are going to wander about these confounded damp woods of yours alone?” cried the American.

“Look here, Mr. Dangelis, please understand this quite clearly. If you ever say a word to your precious Miss Gladys about this little scouting
expedition
, that’s an end of our talks, forever and a day!”

The citizen of Ohio bowed with a mock heroic gesture, removing his hat as he did so.

“I submit to your conditions, Don Quixote. I am entirely at your service. Is it the idea that we should track our friends on hands and knees? I am quite ready even for that, but I know what these woods of yours are like.”

Mr. Quincunx vouchsafed no reply to this
ill-timed
jocosity. He was anxiously surveying the tall hedge upon their right hand. “Here’s the way,” he suddenly exclaimed. “Here’s the path. We can hit a short-cut here that brings us straight through Camel’s Cover, up to Wild Pine. Then we can slip down into Badger’s Bottom and so into the Auber Woods.”

“But I thought the Auber Woods were much nearer than that. You told me the other day that you could get into the heart of them, in a quarter of an hour from your own, garden!”

“And so I can, my friend,” replied Mr. Quincunx, scrambling up the bank into the field, and turning to offer his hand to his companion. “But it happens that this is the way those girls are coming. At any rate that is what she said. They were going to avoid my lane but they were going to enter the woods from the Seven Ashes side, just because it is so much nearer.”

“I submit, I submit,” muttered the artist blandly. “I only hope this scouting business needn’t commence till we have got well through Camel’s Cover and Badger’s Bottom! I must confess I am not
altogether
in love with the sound of those places, though no doubt they are harmless enough. But you people do certainly select the most extraordinary names for your localities. Our own little lapses in these things are classical compared with your Badgers and Camels and Ashes and Dead Men!”

Mr. Quincunx did not condescend to reply to this. He continued to plough his way across the field, every now and then glancing nervously at the sky, which grew more and more threatening. Walking behind him and a little on one side, the American was singularly impressed by the appearance he presented, especially when the faint light of the pallid and cloud-flecked moon fell on his uplifted profile. With his corrugated brow and his pointed beard, Mr. Quincunx was a noticeable figure at any time, but under the present atmospheric conditions his lean form and striking head made a picture of forlorn desolation worthy of the sombre genius of a Bewick.

Dangelis conceived the idea of a picture, which
he himself might be capable of evoking, with this melancholy, solitary figure as its protagonist.

He wondered vaguely what background he would select as worthy of the resolute hopelessness in Mr. Quincunx’s forlorn mien.

It was only after they had traversed the sloping recesses of Camel’s Cover, and had arrived at the crest of the Wild Pine ridge, that he was able to answer this question. Then he knew at once. The true pictorial background for his eccentric companion could be nothing less than that line of wind-shaken, rain-washed Scotch firs, which, visible from all
portions
of Nevilton, had gathered to themselves the very essence of its historic tragedy.

These trees, like Mr. Quincunx, seemed to derive a grim satisfaction from their submission to destiny. Like him, they submitted with a definite volition of resolution. They took, as he took, the line of least resistance with a sort of stark voluptuousness. They did not simply bow to the winds and rains that
oppressed
them. They positively welcomed them. And yet all the while, just as he did, they emitted a low melancholy murmur of protest, a murmur as
completely
different from the howling eloquence of the ashes and elms, as it was different from the low querulous sob of the larches and elders. The rusty-red stain, too, in the rough bark of their trunks, was also singularly congruous with a certain reddish tinge, which often darkened the countenance of the recluse, especially when his fits of goblin-humour shook him into convulsive merriment.

As they paused for a moment on this melancholy ridge, looking back at the flickering lights of the
village
,
and down into the darkness in front of them, the painter made a mental vow that before he left Nevilton he would sublimate his vision of Mr.
Quincunx
into a genuine masterpiece. Plunging once more into the shadows, they followed a dark lane which finally emerged into a wide-sloping valley. In the depths of this was the secluded hollow, full of long grass and tufted reeds, which was the place known as Badger’s Bottom.

The entrance to Auber Wood was now at hand; and as they reached its sinister outskirts, they both instinctively paused to take stock of their
surroundings
. The night was more sultry than ever. The leaves and grasses swayed with an almost
imperceptible
movement, as if stirred, not by the wind, but by the actual heavy breathing of the Earth herself, troubled and agitated in her planetary sleep.

Sombre banks of clouds moved intermittently over the face of a blurred moon, and, out of the soil at their feet, rose up damp exotic odours, giving the whole valley the atmosphere of an enormous
hot-house
.

It was one of those hushed, steamy nights,
pregnant
and listening, which the peculiar conditions of our English climate do not often produce, and which are for that very reason often quite startling in their emotional appeal. The path which the two men took, after once they had entered the wood, was one that led them through a gloomy tunnel of gigantic,
overhanging
laurel-bushes.

All the chief entrances to Auber Wood were edged with these exotics. Some capricious
eighteenth-century
Seldom,—perhaps the one who raised the
Tower of Pleasure on the site of the resting-place of the Holy Rood—had planted them there, and for more than a hundred years they had grown and multiplied.

Auber Lake itself was the centre of a circumference of thick jungle-like brushwood which itself was
overshadowed
by high sloping hills. These hills, also heavily wooded, formed a sort of gigantic cup or basin, and the level expanse of undergrowth they enclosed was itself the margin of a yet deeper
concavity
, in the middle of which was the lake-bed.

Mingling curiously with the more indigenous trees in this place were several unusual and alien
importations
. Some of these, like the huge laurels they were now passing under, belonged more properly to
gardens
than to woods. Others were of a still stranger and more foreign nature, and produced a very bizarre effect where they grew, as though one had suddenly come upon the circle of some heathen grove, in the midst of an English forest. Auber Lake was
certainly
a spot of an unusual character. Once it had been drained, and a large monolith, of the same stone as that produced by Leo’s Hill, had been discovered embedded in the mud. Traces were said to have been discerned upon this of ancient human carving, but local antiquarianism had contradicted this rumour. At least it may be said that nowhere else on the Romer estate, except perhaps in Nevilton churchyard, was the tawny-colored clay which bore so close a symbolic, if not a geological, relation to the famous yellow sandstone, more heavily and malignantly clinging, in its oozy consistence.

Dangelis and Mr. Quincunx advanced slowly, and in profound silence, along their overshadowed path.

An occasional wood-pigeon, disturbed in its
roosting
, flapped awkwardly through the branches; and far away, in another part of the wood, sounded at intervals the melancholy cry of a screech-owl.

Great leather-winged bats flitted over their heads with queer unearthly little cries; and every now and then some agitated moth, from the under-bushes, fluttered heavily across their faces. Sometimes in the darkness their feet stumbled upon a dead branch, but more often they slipped uneasily in the deep ruts left in the mud by the woodmen’s carts.

All the various intermittent noises they heard only threw the palpable stillness of the place into heavier relief.

The artist from the wind-swept plains of Ohio felt as though he had never plunged so deeply into the indrawn recesses of the earth-powers as he was doing now. It seemed to him as though they were
approaching
the guarded precincts of some dark and
crouching
idol. It was as if, by some ill-omened mistake, they had stumbled unawares upon a spot that through interminable ages had been forbidden to human tread.

And yet the place seemed to expect them, to await them; to have in reserve for them some laboured pregnancy of woeful significance.

Once more, as he walked behind Mr. Quincunx, Dangelis was startled by the extraordinary congruity of that forlorn figure with the occasion and the scene. The form of the recluse seemed to exhale a reciprocity of fearful brooding. Auber Wood seemed aware of him, and ready to welcome him, in
consentaneou
s
 
sympathy. He might have been the
long-expected
priest of some immemorial rites transacted there, the priest of some old heathen worship, perhaps the worship of generations of dead people, buried under those damp leaves.

It seemed a long while to Ralph Dangelis, in spite of the breathless quickening of his imagination, before the laurel-tunnel thinned away, and the two men were able to walk side by side between the trunks of the larger trees. Here again they encountered Scotch firs.

What strange dream, of what fantastic possessor of this solitude, had shaped itself into the planting of these moorland giants, among the native-born oaks and beeches of this weird place?

The open spaces at the foot of the tree-trunks were filled with an obscure mass of oozy stalks and heavily drooping leaves. The obscurity of the spot made it difficult to discern the differences between these rank growths; but the ghostly flowers of
enormous
hemlocks stood forth from among the rest. Fungoid excrescences, of some sort or another, were certainly prolific here. Their charnel-house odour set Dangelis thinking of a morgue he had once visited.

At last—and with quite startling suddenness—the path they followed emerged into a wide open expanse; and there,—under the diffused light of the cloud-darkened moon—they saw stretched at their feet the dim surface of Auber Lake.

Mr. Quincunx stood for a moment motionless and silent, leaning upon his stick. Then he turned to his companion; and the American noticed how vague
and shadowy his face looked, as if it were a face seen through some more opaque medium than that of air.

They sat down together upon a fallen log; and out of an instinctive desire to break the tension of the spell that lay on him Dangelis lit a cigarette.

He had smoked in silence for some moments, when Mr. Quincunx, who had been listening
attentively
, raised his hand. “Hark!” he said, “do you hear anything?”

Across the stillness of the water came a low
blood-curdling
wail. It was hardly a human sound, and yet it was not like the voice of any bird or beast. It seemed to unsettle the drowsy natives of the spot; for a harsh twittering of sedge-birds answered it, and a great water-rat splashed down into the lake.