Toss fortune back her tinsel and her plume,
And drop this mask of flesh behind the scene.--_Young_.
The two dwellers in the Strath went on dreaming. Drayton had reserved
a small ante-chamber leading out from the saloon for his work-room.
Here the escutcheon of the mask was endlessly repeated in wood,
plaster, and copper; a pinched tragic face was represented,
crest-like, upon the picture frames, and along the cornice. And it was
here that the tragic influence of the house was felt more strongly
than elsewhere.
The day was grey. The sun had shone little of late; and a moist wind
carried restlessly through the garden. The playwright sat nursing a
volume which served him for a desk. He appeared in good health,
although his eyes had a trick of roving, and at times he would shudder
as though with cold. He believed that he had never been so well in his
life, and this opinion was shared by Conway, who was lying in the
saloon, listening to his friend. The journal that he loved was lying
open upon a cushion before him. The draperies which divided the two
rooms were fastened back, and when the enraptured voice came louder to
his ears Conway put back his head and laughed in sheer happiness as he
heard the noisy sophistry of the writer:
“I cannot conceive a Deity who finds pleasure in tragedy. The Creator
must understand and appreciate comedy. If there be the divine frown,
there must be also the divine laughter. I am assured that the Sublime
would rather see a wine-skin dressed out in child’s clothes than the
lion-hide and the club; and rather hear the quack of the frog-souls
against the Acherusian lake than those anguished cries in the grove of
the Eumenides. If that be so, let us have no more tragedy. Let us grow
wings and fly to Cloudcuckootown, and take a bird’s eye view across
mortality.”
“Before you attempt to fly, be sure that your wings will bear you,”
called Conway, also speaking in the spirit of ancient comedy. “The
nearer the sun the greater the effort; and if you fall there may be no
Icarian sea to receive you.”
“Give me a theme, and I will set to work upon it,” cried the
enraptured Drayton.
“Listen then,” said Conway, picking up the journal. “Take a well known
theme. In old fields we gather fresh flowers, and new learning may be
found in the oldest tales.” Then he went on thus to read:
“Can there be anything more bitter than solitude? This morning I was
driven out by my aching tongue to speak to nature. I called to the
flowers, and they were silent. I cried to the birds, and they
chattered, but not to me. I whispered to the stream, and it murmured,
but not to me. The eyes I saw in that water were not those you have in
your memory, my fair-haired love. I spoke to the trees, to the wind,
to the clouds, and despairingly to God. The trees whispered, and the
wind murmured, but not for me; the clouds drifted on; and God remained
more silent than any of the wonders He has made.
“The prisoner in the Fleet has consolations which I may not share. He
may wrangle with his turnkey concerning fees, or argue with his
fellows in misfortune. I have nothing, but memory and faith. There is
a place for me in this world, and I may not fill it; a love, and I may
not have it; a life, and I may not enter into it; one voice above all
others, and I may not hear it. This is to be in prison indeed.
“You will wonder, Geoffrey, should this little book in time to come be
brought into your hands, why I did not escape from this misery, before
death, like some kindly nurse, snatched me from my play-things and put
me to my bed. Let me answer you. The roads are watched, not only
against your coming, but against my going. I know that silent men
follow me. Were I to enter a coach, I should be dragged down. Were I
to steal forth some night, I should be seized, brought back by
violence, and beaten for my effort.
“Sir John fears me, because I know too much concerning his two-faced
life. Yet for my freedom I would promise anything, nay, I have
promised, but ’tis of no avail. He knows that the caged bird is
secure, but let that bird fly, and it will be seen no more. There is
also another, more bitter reason. That it is which now tears out my
heart. My uncle, miser and parson of Queensmore, told me, with a grin
and a screwing up of his pig-like eyes, that you were lately taken by
the press. That pitiless and cunning wolf my father set the plot to be
rid of you. May God alone forgive him.
“Is it true? While I write these words are you far upon the seas,
shamefully degraded and abused? You could not have kept from me a
whole year. You would have found a way, for love laughs at swords, and
knows no fear, and has no sense of bodily pain. You have gone far from
me, and I am left with a sad last hope that someone will be found to
tell you I was true. My final breath shall be in prayer that you may
be brought some day into Thorlund, to stand upon a cold stone marking
the spot where I shall be in silence. Do not be afraid, Geoffrey, even
though it be night and a wild wind beating; for your mind shall not be
troubled and you shall see no ghostly sight. You will know I did
myself no harm.
“Would that I might leave you something, a ribbon, a lock of hair, a
ring. Why, so I will. None but old Deborah shall handle this small
white body when I am wrung out of it, and she will do my bidding yet.
Our vault lies beneath the chancel. You have but to shut yourself in
the church during the night, raise the great stone beside the
wall--’tis graven with the Hooper arms, surmounted by a cross
fimbriated--and descend the stone steps. Beloved, do not be afraid. I
shall be loving you still, and I may be nearer than you think. If a
light breath passes, call it not night wind. Upon my body you shall
find the ring you gave me, and the lock of hair which now lies upon my
forehead. Yet I have forgotten. My brain is wandering. How shall you
discover this poor record of my daily life?
“The trees are white with dust, and the flowers wither. No rain has
fallen for long, and the people who dwell upon the hills are hard put
to it for water, and much sickness is, I hear, abroad. Mr. Blair takes
his customary ease, smokes his long pipe, makes fishing-lines, and
turns a deaf ear to the calls of the cottage folk. His duty begins and
ends with his Sunday sermons, and these he is too idle or too ignorant
to write himself. What a little charity there is in this great world!
I can do nothing for the poor. I may not visit them, nor send one
bottle of my father’s wine. Reed, who is the master of this house,
keeps a sharp eye upon the household, and nothing goes out without his
knowledge. ’Tis strange that my father should trust him, and none
besides, but villainy acquaints a man with vile partners.
“To-day I met with Poor John, one who has lost his wits and roams
about the country making verses. I see him often, at evening trapping
sparrows in the ivy, at morning whistling beneath the elms, and at
noon lying beside the stream to laugh at the image of his white face.
He asked me for apples, as his custom is, but I could only tell him
that all last year’s apples were done. Then he gave me a whistle,
which he had made, and directed me to go into the woods and blow upon
it, when I would immediately set all the birds a-singing. And so he
left me grinning. Poor John do they call him? Why, he is far happier
than I. I could envy this gentle madman. He views his surroundings
through a weird atmosphere of imagination, and regards sane suffering
men and women as underlings, and passes them in the belief that he is
nature’s king, never knowing what a misshapen oaf he seems to them.
“It is exceeding hot. My brain aches and my eyes burn. This is my
twentieth summer. I have lived a long time. You have been given and
taken away; I mourn the loss and forget to be thankful for the gift.
My books tell me nothing is left for a woman when the time of her
love-making is passed. The man may still have his ambitions. He may
attempt to follow in the steps of Mr. Pope, Mr. Garrick, Mr. Hogarth,
or Mr. Fielding. He may serve his country, or aid the Pretender,
winning scars and fame, as you may be doing while I write, my
Geoffrey. But Miss Hooper, sad, and white, and shivering--what may she
do? Nothing but sigh, and wait, and hope; and sighing kills, waiting
maddens, and as for hope--why, hope is a fading flower. Oh, Geoffrey,
cannot you send some small message through all this darkness,
something to tell me that you live? Cannot you make a sign? I listen
in the night for the movement of your spirit, or the echo of your
mind. Ought I not to feel your heart longing for me? I hear only the
night throbbing, the insects murmuring, the house creaking, and beyond
there is cold pitiless space half-lit by stars. The daffodils were
glorious this year, Geoffrey. They filled the plantation with a light
of gold, and yours was there, and I stood by it alone.”
The reader stopped, and a gentle movement came from the ante-room.
“There was a time when every living creature saw the bright side of
things,” said the voice of Drayton. “Even when the human emotions were
first represented upon the stage, it was believed that happiness ruled
the world, until the philosophers discovered that whereas one play
aroused the laughter of the audience another excited their compassion
and their tears. Thereupon the drama became divided into its two great
heads, known as the goat-song and the wine-song, the goat being the
prize for tragedy, the wine for comedy. Comedy is the beginning of the
story; tragedy is the end; there is only the difference of a letter
between them. That which you have read seems to me to contain the germ
of tragedy. When my modern drama, dealing with the life and death of
George the Third, is completed I will give the world that story. The
emotions are there,” he went on noisily. “I see light there, and it
must be the phosphorescence of the dead which produces it.”
Conway joined the speaker. His face was pale, and his eyes shone with
a mad light as he cried, “Let us remain here and work together. Let us
discover the origin of love, and find the cause of its unhappy ending.
Why does the glamour of life end when love has been satisfied?”
“Because of that satisfaction,” said the other character.
“That could never be so here.”
“There is a vast region outside,” said Drayton. “Love is here a
religion; there a passion. Here desire becomes etherealised by
possession, and consummation leads to higher things; there ambition,
rivalries, and all the petty wedges of worldliness are driven in to
love’s destruction. It ends in a tragedy there. It must end so,
because of that finality. For every thing that knows an end is a
tragedy.”
All the little tragic masks frowned at the spell-bound men, in copper
and wood and plaster.
“There is no such thing as comedy at all.”
“Call the drama a knot,” said Drayton. “Call, the gradual unloosening
of that knot comedy, the complete unfastening tragedy. The one deals
with human beings, the other with actions. The light which falls upon
the stage is constant, if difficult to discern. That light is not shed
by religion, for religion is a superstition, and superstition is a
flickering lamp which requires to be often recharged and changed. We
live in the faintly glimmering region which lies outside, where there
is no terror and no suffering, because we are spiritual. This state
cannot be tragic, because it knows no ending.”
“Our minds demand an ending,” the other urged.
“When the body ceases to be material the mind will be unable to
realise an ending,” said the man, who but a few weeks back had with
difficulty made a living by writing snippets of nonsense for people of
no intellect. “We are living in the half-light under these present
conditions. It is the finest state we are capable of attaining while
encumbered with the body.”
He leaned forward, parted the creepers, and holding them apart
continued: “I perceive a woman walking in the garden. She is looking
into the lilies beyond the topiary hedge. Her hair is dark, and her
face tanned by exposure to the weather. Now she turns to me. There is
a poetic gloom in her dark eyes.”
Before Drayton had done speaking he was alone. Conway had stepped into
the garden. The creepers fell back across the window, the scribe’s
fingers closed round the pencil, and he resumed his automatic labours.
It was Lone Nance who stood in the garden. She was often there, but
the dreamers had not sighted her before, because she had hidden
herself when she saw them coming. They had heard a singing voice
during the still evenings, but had given it no heed. What was it to
them if the nightingale sang old ballads, and the blackcap madrigals,
so long as the songs were in tune with the influence?
He, who was called the master of the Strath, reached the yew hedge,
and discovered the girl scraping moss from a long low stone. She
looked up at him fearlessly with large eyes lightly blurred with
tears.
“Why do you kneel beside that stone?” Conway muttered, not venturing
to remove his eyes lest the vision should disappear. “And why are
there tears in your eyes?”
The girl put out her hand and held up the speckled and stiffened body
of a thrush, which had been smitten by some hawk and had tumbled into
the garden to die in the dust.
“The birds come to the Strath to die,” she said. “I will not bury it,
for there may still be life in its little brain. I will let it lie
upon the stems of this long grass, where the wind shall rock it up and
down, and the sun shall warm it, until the little body may forget that
it is dead.”
“Why are you scraping the moss off that stone?” he urged.
“I was running on the hills when a voice stopped me and called me into
the valley,” she answered.
“I did not hear it,” he said.
“At sunset there is always a voice, like music melting in the air,”
she said. “You must make no sound, or you will not hear it. He hears
it.” She nodded in the direction of the rectory.
“What is that stone? Why is it broken across the middle?”
“This stone cries out, and the house answers it,” went on the girl in
a low voice. “Lives and hearts have been broken here. He was young and
he was beautiful. As they carried him past the gates into the garden
he sighed once and that was all. They buried the body here that night,
and covered the grave with a great stone taken from the stable-yard.
But in the morning the stone was broken. The spirit had escaped in
spite of them.”
“What was his name?” Conway asked.
“I do not know. His hair was fair, and his eyes were blue. I have seen
him walking with the lady of the white lilies.”
She stroked the stone. Her hand was a deep brown, bearing marks of
bramble scratches, and the fingers were delicate. Her head was small.
There were white seeds of grass held in its thick dark hair. She was
strong and healthy, this wild girl.
“I have never been in there,” she said, pointing towards the house.
“Come with me,” said Conway. Holding the girl’s hand, he led her
through the garden, across the moat, into his home, and left her at
length beside the door of what had been Miss Hooper’s room. “This is
your place,” he said quietly. “You will find here all that you can
require.”
But there still existed a gross world of evil-thinking outside the
influence, and there was materialism even within the Strath. Early in
the afternoon the crone of the kitchen accosted the master, as he
walked in a state of innocence, and stated her intention of quitting
the place forthwith. The influence had left her absolutely untouched;
she had no laughter to give, nor shudder to spend. But she could not
tolerate the presence of Lone Nance; and if the girl were to remain
she, the speaker, would go, and that immediately, even to the work
house and her pauper’s coffin.
Conway could not understand, nor was he able to reason with the
rachitic dame, who insisted upon dragging the custom of another world
into his paradise. Why this turmoil because another character had been
added to the drama? He did not know why she should seek to disturb his
state of peace. There were the iron gates in all visibility; she might
so easily walk off the stage. The birds did not first come to him, and
scold noisily, if they intended to fly away.
“Human nature has many phases,” observed the philosophic Drayton, when
the respectable dame came and appealed to him. “One well-defined trait
is a longing after change.” Then he gravely handed her the Ethics of
Aristotle, and bade her study the pages for her soul’s good.
Finally the poor muddy-minded creature became appeased, not through
the wisdom of Aristotle, nor yet by the indifference of her masters,
but owing to the natural passing of her indignation after the noisy
assertion of her wrongs. She returned to the kitchen, after a manner
mollified, to grope grumbling among the pots, and to prepare the
evening meal which differed not from day to day.
That same evening rumour went rustling into Kingsmore, where the
relations of Lone Nance lived, and charges were brought against
Conway, as gross as they were false, while wiseacres nodded heads of
clay and recalled predictions made by them aforetime. They had seen
the squire of Thorlund at the fair, and had written him down a fellow
of the baser sort. They exhorted the lone girl’s guardians to take
immediate action; but these practical folk merely realised that there
was no longer a superfluous mouth to feed and an irresponsible spirit
to suppress. Only one old man was sage enough to say, “No harm will
come to her if she is at the Strath.” To those who reminded him of
Henry Reed’s fate the grandfather replied, “He set himself against the
place.”
When Dr. Berry came into the garden at his accustomed time he
discovered a young woman, dressed in the mode of the eighteenth
century, selecting blooms from the rose-bushes. He bent his head
courteously and passed without a word.
The night fell, close, humid, and dark. There was not a breath of wind
to move the heavy clouds which obliterated space and its starlight.
Through a mist hanging about he garden beamed the light of a single
candle, set beside the stone under the topiary hedge. The long yellow
flame rose like an ear of wheat, and only flickered when a moth darted
into it. There was a sound of music in the house, and presently the
chorus reached the garden, and loomed into the misty radiance of the
candlelight. First came Nance, grave and self-possessed, her head
bare, her hands full of white roses; then Drayton and Conway; and
finally Dr. Berry. They were holding sprigs of rosemary gathered from
the herb-garden.
They took their stand about the stone, and when the girl had covered
it with her roses the exarchus recited the office of the dead. The
garden was steeped in silence outside the halo of light. The window of
the saloon could be seen faintly glowing in the distance, but the
outlines of the house were lost.
The Dithyramb was sung and the chorus marched away, leaving the solemn
candle to burn itself away among the blooms. The Bacchanalians sat
down to eat and to drink, but there was no sound of laughter, nor any
careless word. The mind of the house was grim.
The procession made its way out the second time, Dr. Berry leading.
Behind him came Conway and Drayton carrying iron bars and chisels.
They passed the gate leading into the churchyard. Beneath a drip-stone
terminating in a diabolic face, at the west end of the building, the
scholar left them and went to his house for the key. The atmosphere
continued to be dense; not a sound was heard, except the squeaking of
bats, and the cry of a nightjar.
When the heavily clamped door had been opened, the three men passed
into the mouldy interior. The rector locked the door, lighted one of
the chancel lamps, and indicated a long stone let into the tiles,
beneath the north wall of the building; and, when the others
hesitated, he snatched the bar from Conway’s nervous hands and forced
its point into the mortar which crumbled in the crevice.
A canopied memorial, adorned by miniature fluted columns and capitals
of spiral volutes, acanthus-leaf bosses, brackets of decorated
foliage, grape pendants, and crotchets terminating in mitre-head
finials, had been let into the chancel wall, where a marble slab
lyingly recited virtues of dead and gone Hoopers. There was no mention
of Sir John, nor of his wife Edith, nor of his daughter Winifred; and
the parish registers dealing with their period had been destroyed by
carelessness and by fire. The baronet, as was well known, had been
buried in unconsecrated ground. The stone which closed the entry to
the vault was soft and much chipped. The cement crumbled at a touch.
Conway, who had joined the work in fearful expectancy, felt the slab
heave. Another moment it came up, and they could hear the hollow sound
made by fragments of mortar falling into the vault below.
A step appeared, dry and dusty, and when a candle was brought and
lowered they discerned a narrow flight leading into the silent space.
Dr. Berry was the first to descend, and Conway the last. A brick arch
sloped over them, and on either side appeared stout shelves,
supporting narrow berths where the bodies of the extinct family had
been put aside like old garments in a press.
“This is the one,” the scholar whispered, raising the candle above his
head, and tapping a worm-eaten plank which gave forth a hollow echo.
“Died December 12th, aged 20,” muttered Conway.
“Let us see whether her lover came to her,” the scholar murmured.
There was nothing terrible about those swathed remains. Only a lock of
fair hair, which had escaped from its bonds somehow, glistened when
the candlelight entered the coffin. What had been little white hands
were folded; and between them Conway perceived a tiny packet, bound
with white ribbon, and inscribed with one word “Geoffrey.” He put out
his hand, but shrank, afraid to rob the dead.
“It was never meant for me,” he whispered.
“Nevertheless take it,” urged the rector. “She does not need it now.”
Conway put out his arm, but again the effort failed. The packet was
retained jealously, and the grave-breaker had neither the courage nor
the inclination to use force. He turned away quickly, and sought the
steps, muttering as he escaped, “She will not let it go.”
“I wished to bury it beneath the stone where her lover lies,” murmured
Dr. Berry, as he also turned away. “But she knows what is best.”
As they replaced the stone, the light went out. Velvety darkness,
heavy as cobwebs, closed down, submerging them, leaving them standing
as it were upon the bottom of the sea of space. Then Drayton spoke:
“A current of cold air passed me. It was going from east to west.”
“It passed me also,” said the rector. “And I could see its outline and
its eyes.”