"There is a wild beast in your woods," said the artist Cunningham, as he
was being driven to the station. It was the only remark he had made
during the drive, but as Van Cheele had talked incessantly his
companion's silence had not been noticeable.
"A stray fox or two and some resident weasels. Nothing more formidable,"
said Van Cheele. The artist said nothing.
"What did you mean about a wild beast?" said Van Cheele later, when they
were on the platform.
"Nothing. My imagination. Here is the train," said Cunningham.
That afternoon Van Cheele went for one of his frequent rambles through
his woodland property. He had a stuffed bittern in his study, and knew
the names of quite a number of wild flowers, so his aunt had possibly
some justification in describing him as a great naturalist. At any rate,
he was a great walker. It was his custom to take mental notes of
everything he saw during his walks, not so much for the purpose of
assisting contemporary science as to provide topics for conversation
afterwards. When the bluebells began to show themselves in flower he
made a point of informing every one of the fact; the season of the year
might have warned his hearers of the likelihood of such an occurrence,
but at least they felt that he was being absolutely frank with them.
What Van Cheele saw on this particular afternoon was, however, something
far removed from his ordinary range of experience. On a shelf of smooth
stone overhanging a deep pool in the hollow of an oak coppice a boy of
about sixteen lay asprawl, drying his wet brown limbs luxuriously in the
sun. His wet hair, parted by a recent dive, lay close to his head, and
his light-brown eyes, so light that there was an almost tigerish gleam in
them, were turned towards Van Cheele with a certain lazy watchfulness.
It was an unexpected apparition, and Van Cheele found himself engaged in
the novel process of thinking before he spoke. Where on earth could this
wild-looking boy hail from? The miller's wife had lost a child some two
months ago, supposed to have been swept away by the mill-race, but that
had been a mere baby, not a half-grown lad.
"What are you doing there?" he demanded.
"Obviously, sunning myself," replied the boy.
"Where do you live?"
"Here, in these woods."
"You can't live in the woods," said Van Cheele.
"They are very nice woods," said the boy, with a touch of patronage in
his voice.
"But where do you sleep at night?"
"I don't sleep at night; that's my busiest time."
Van Cheele began to have an irritated feeling that he was grappling with
a problem that was eluding him.
"What do you feed on?" he asked.
"Flesh," said the boy, and he pronounced the word with slow relish, as
though he were tasting it.
"Flesh! What Flesh?"
"Since it interests you, rabbits, wild-fowl, hares, poultry, lambs in
their season, children when I can get any; they're usually too well
locked in at night, when I do most of my hunting. It's quite two months
since I tasted child-flesh."
Ignoring the chaffing nature of the last remark Van Cheele tried to draw
the boy on the subject of possible poaching operations.
"You're talking rather through your hat when you speak of feeding on
hares." (Considering the nature of the boy's toilet the simile was
hardly an apt one.) "Our hillside hares aren't easily caught."
"At night I hunt on four feet," was the somewhat cryptic response.
"I suppose you mean that you hunt with a dog?" hazarded Van Cheele.
The boy rolled slowly over on to his back, and laughed a weird low laugh,
that was pleasantly like a chuckle and disagreeably like a snarl.
"I don't fancy any dog would be very anxious for my company, especially
at night."
Van Cheele began to feel that there was something positively uncanny
about the strange-eyed, strange-tongued youngster.
"I can't have you staying in these woods," he declared authoritatively.
"I fancy you'd rather have me here than in your house," said the boy.
The prospect of this wild, nude animal in Van Cheele's primly ordered
house was certainly an alarming one.
"If you don't go. I shall have to make you," said Van Cheele.
The boy turned like a flash, plunged into the pool, and in a moment had
flung his wet and glistening body half-way up the bank where Van Cheele
was standing. In an otter the movement would not have been remarkable;
in a boy Van Cheele found it sufficiently startling. His foot slipped as
he made an involuntarily backward movement, and he found himself almost
prostrate on the slippery weed-grown bank, with those tigerish yellow
eyes not very far from his own. Almost instinctively he half raised his
hand to his throat. They boy laughed again, a laugh in which the snarl
had nearly driven out the chuckle, and then, with another of his
astonishing lightning movements, plunged out of view into a yielding
tangle of weed and fern.
"What an extraordinary wild animal!" said Van Cheele as he picked himself
up. And then he recalled Cunningham's remark "There is a wild beast in
your woods."
Walking slowly homeward, Van Cheele began to turn over in his mind
various local occurrences which might be traceable to the existence of
this astonishing young savage.
Something had been thinning the game in the woods lately, poultry had
been missing from the farms, hares were growing unaccountably scarcer,
and complaints had reached him of lambs being carried off bodily from the
hills. Was it possible that this wild boy was really hunting the
countryside in company with some clever poacher dogs? He had spoken of
hunting "four-footed" by night, but then, again, he had hinted strangely
at no dog caring to come near him, "especially at night." It was
certainly puzzling. And then, as Van Cheele ran his mind over the
various depredations that had been committed during the last month or
two, he came suddenly to a dead stop, alike in his walk and his
speculations. The child missing from the mill two months ago--the
accepted theory was that it had tumbled into the mill-race and been swept
away; but the mother had always declared she had heard a shriek on the
hill side of the house, in the opposite direction from the water. It was
unthinkable, of course, but he wished that the boy had not made that
uncanny remark about child-flesh eaten two months ago. Such dreadful
things should not be said even in fun.
Van Cheele, contrary to his usual wont, did not feel disposed to be
communicative about his discovery in the wood. His position as a parish
councillor and justice of the peace seemed somehow compromised by the
fact that he was harbouring a personality of such doubtful repute on his
property; there was even a possibility that a heavy bill of damages for
raided lambs and poultry might be laid at his door. At dinner that night
he was quite unusually silent.
"Where's your voice gone to?" said his aunt. "One would think you had
seen a wolf."
Van Cheele, who was not familiar with the old saying, thought the remark
rather foolish; if he _had_ seen a wolf on his property his tongue would
have been extraordinarily busy with the subject.
At breakfast next morning Van Cheele was conscious that his feeling of
uneasiness regarding yesterday's episode had not wholly disappeared, and
he resolved to go by train to the neighbouring cathedral town, hunt up
Cunningham, and learn from him what he had really seen that had prompted
the remark about a wild beast in the woods. With this resolution taken,
his usual cheerfulness partially returned, and he hummed a bright little
melody as he sauntered to the morning-room for his customary cigarette.
As he entered the room the melody made way abruptly for a pious
invocation. Gracefully asprawl on the ottoman, in an attitude of almost
exaggerated repose, was the boy of the woods. He was drier than when Van
Cheele had last seen him, but no other alteration was noticeable in his
toilet.
"How dare you come here?" asked Van Cheele furiously.
"You told me I was not to stay in the woods," said the boy calmly.
"But not to come here. Supposing my aunt should see you!"
And with a view to minimising that catastrophe, Van Cheele hastily
obscured as much of his unwelcome guest as possible under the folds of a
_Morning Post_. At that moment his aunt entered the room.
"This is a poor boy who has lost his way--and lost his memory. He
doesn't know who he is or where he comes from," explained Van Cheele
desperately, glancing apprehensively at the waif's face to see whether he
was going to add inconvenient candour to his other savage propensities.
Miss Van Cheele was enormously interested.
"Perhaps his underlinen is marked," she suggested.
"He seems to have lost most of that, too," said Van Cheele, making
frantic little grabs at the _Morning Post_ to keep it in its place.
A naked homeless child appealed to Miss Van Cheele as warmly as a stray
kitten or derelict puppy would have done.
"We must do all we can for him," she decided, and in a very short time a
messenger, dispatched to the rectory, where a page-boy was kept, had
returned with a suit of pantry clothes, and the necessary accessories of
shirt, shoes, collar, etc. Clothed, clean, and groomed, the boy lost
none of his uncanniness in Van Cheele's eyes, but his aunt found him
sweet.
"We must call him something till we know who he really is," she said.
"Gabriel-Ernest, I think; those are nice suitable names."
Van Cheele agreed, but he privately doubted whether they were being
grafted on to a nice suitable child. His misgivings were not diminished
by the fact that his staid and elderly spaniel had bolted out of the
house at the first incoming of the boy, and now obstinately remained
shivering and yapping at the farther end of the orchard, while the
canary, usually as vocally industrious as Van Cheele himself, had put
itself on an allowance of frightened cheeps. More than ever he was
resolved to consult Cunningham without loss of time.
As he drove off to the station his aunt was arranging that Gabriel-Ernest
should help her to entertain the infant members of her Sunday-school
class at tea that afternoon.
Cunningham was not at first disposed to be communicative.
"My mother died of some brain trouble," he explained, "so you will
understand why I am averse to dwelling on anything of an impossibly
fantastic nature that I may see or think that I have seen."
"But what _did_ you see?" persisted Van Cheele.
"What I thought I saw was something so extraordinary that no really sane
man could dignify it with the credit of having actually happened. I was
standing, the last evening I was with you, half-hidden in the
hedge-growth by the orchard gate, watching the dying glow of the sunset.
Suddenly I became aware of a naked boy, a bather from some neighbouring
pool, I took him to be, who was standing out on the bare hillside also
watching the sunset. His pose was so suggestive of some wild faun of
Pagan myth that I instantly wanted to engage him as a model, and in
another moment I think I should have hailed him. But just then the sun
dipped out of view, and all the orange and pink slid out of the
landscape, leaving it cold and grey. And at the same moment an
astounding thing happened--the boy vanished too!"
"What! vanished away into nothing?" asked Van Cheele excitedly.
"No; that is the dreadful part of it," answered the artist; "on the open
hillside where the boy had been standing a second ago, stood a large
wolf, blackish in colour, with gleaming fangs and cruel, yellow eyes.
You may think--"
But Van Cheele did not stop for anything as futile as thought. Already
he was tearing at top speed towards the station. He dismissed the idea
of a telegram. "Gabriel-Ernest is a werewolf" was a hopelessly
inadequate effort at conveying the situation, and his aunt would think it
was a code message to which he had omitted to give her the key. His one
hope was that he might reach home before sundown. The cab which he
chartered at the other end of the railway journey bore him with what
seemed exasperating slowness along the country roads, which were pink and
mauve with the flush of the sinking sun. His aunt was putting away some
unfinished jams and cake when he arrived.
"Where is Gabriel-Ernest?" he almost screamed.
"He is taking the little Toop child home," said his aunt. "It was
getting so late, I thought it wasn't safe to let it go back alone. What
a lovely sunset, isn't it?"
But Van Cheele, although not oblivious of the glow in the western sky,
did not stay to discuss its beauties. At a speed for which he was
scarcely geared he raced along the narrow lane that led to the home of
the Toops. On one side ran the swift current of the mill-stream, on the
other rose the stretch of bare hillside. A dwindling rim of red sun
showed still on the skyline, and the next turning must bring him in view
of the ill-assorted couple he was pursuing. Then the colour went
suddenly out of things, and a grey light settled itself with a quick
shiver over the landscape. Van Cheele heard a shrill wail of fear, and
stopped running.
Nothing was ever seen again of the Toop child or Gabriel-Ernest, but the
latter's discarded garments were found lying in the road so it was
assumed that the child had fallen into the water, and that the boy had
stripped and jumped in, in a vain endeavour to save it. Van Cheele and
some workmen who were near by at the time testified to having heard a
child scream loudly just near the spot where the clothes were found.
Mrs. Toop, who had eleven other children, was decently resigned to her
bereavement, but Miss Van Cheele sincerely mourned her lost foundling.
It was on her initiative that a memorial brass was put up in the parish
church to "Gabriel-Ernest, an unknown boy, who bravely sacrificed his
life for another."
Van Cheele gave way to his aunt in most things, but he flatly refused to
subscribe to the Gabriel-Ernest memorial.