COSAS DE BRUJAS
I have been here before,
But when or how I cannot tell.
_Sudden Light._
"My dearest dear, will you come for a little walk?"
"Muy señora mia, with all the pleasure in life."
Lettice, who was stooping over a new kitten which she had adopted since
the departure of Geraldine, straightened herself and looked at Gardiner
with a discouraging expression. They were at the back of the house; she
had been about to climb the steep hill orchard to watch the sunset when
her minute friend charged out of the kitchen door, on her weak little
legs no thicker than matches, with her tiny triangular tail flourishing
in the air. Lettice had not, however, expected her host to follow
directly on the kitten's heels.
He stood there laughing. "It's time for your evening constitutional.
You haven't been out once since Denis went off. He left you in my
charge; I shan't feel I'm doing my duty if I don't accept your very
pressing invitation."
"I was not speaking to you," said Lettice deliberately.
He only laughed again.
"I know that; you never do speak to a Christian if you can possibly get
out of it, do you? Give me that atom. No, I won't hurt her; I've some
milk for her here--she was just going to drink it when she heard your
welcome footstep and affection was too much for her. Come on, vidita
mia."
Dexterously, even tenderly, he detached the clinging claws from
Lettice's shoulder, and set down the mite at the saucer. The little
head nodded over it, sniffing tentatively, and then out came a minute
pink tongue and she began to lap, crouching down and crooning a
contented purr. Lettice liked the way Gardiner lifted out a paw which
had insinuated itself into the saucer, and stroked one finger down four
inches of tabby spine. Then he looked up.
"As a matter of fact, I've an errand on hand, at the farm where we get
our milk. Will you come with me? I wish you would. I'm bored of my own
company."
"Is it far?" asked Lettice defensively.
"Mile. Don't come if you're fagged, but sacrifice yourself to oblige a
fellow-creature if it's only laziness--or unsociability."
"Well," said Lettice, permitting herself the hint of a smile. She liked
again the quick way he picked himself up, taking her at her word to the
instant.
"Come on, then. There's only just time; I've masses of letters to write
before the post goes, and I know you aren't going to be hurried."
For all his quickness (and he was instinctively quick and light in
every movement), Lettice found him a more considerate companion than
Denis, who walked her off her legs. Their way led up through the steep
hill orchard to the grassy hill-side above. Once he stopped and turned
to help her over the rough ground, but when she silently avoided seeing
his extended hand, he did not offer it again. Denis, rooted in his
old-fashioned courtesy, had never learned to leave her alone. This was
a very different type of mind; less restful, because more perceptive.
When they reached the crest of the hill he pulled up. Lettice tried to
persuade herself it was not done to let her get her breath, but she was
quite sure it was.
"See that hedge over there?" he said, pointing across the expanse of
level silvery grass. "Well, you'd never think it, but beyond that it's
nothing but arable flats, beet and cabbages and potatoes, all the
way to Rochehaut. Anything duller you can't imagine. And yet under
this very spot where we're standing there's a cave that's never been
explored, running Lord knows how deep into the hill. Stalactites and
stalagmites and an underground river. I went in once with my torch, but
I had to come back--too unsafe. Some day I'll have that place shored
up and made accessible, and charge five francs for admission, like the
caves of Han. Leg-up for the Bellevue, what? I like this sort of mixed
grill, you know, wild and tame together--I like all this country. No,
not that way--there's some view from the crucifix you see against the
sky-line, but we haven't time for it to-night. Along here, through the
wood."
Lettice looked round, before following him into the copse of starveling
firs, and gorse, and ragged heather. From where they stood, a little
below the crucifix, they could not see the valley; only the silvery
undulating hill-side, and the evening sky, and the grasses leaning
sidelong in the wind. It was lonely and bare enough to please her. "Are
you going to stop here?" she asked.
"I am. _D.V._ What? Oh yes, I'm pious in my way, especially when I get
off alone among these hills. I believe I belong here--sort of ancestral
feeling; talking of which, I'll show you something rather queer at the
farm when we get there. Yes, I'm going to stay, if I'm let." He walked
on, twirling his stick in the air. "Last time I was up here it was with
Miss O'Connor," he added irrelevantly.
Lettice was a good deal surprised; she thought she understood now why
he had not wished to come alone. She had not been told, but she knew,
as well from his looks as from Dorothea's headlong flight, that the
explosion had come. Gardiner might keep up his laugh, that eternal
laugh which grated on a sensitive ear like the squeaking of a pen, but
he could not hide the change in his features, pinched and sharpened by
suffering. Suffering--yes--pain: physical pain, that was what his face
betrayed: not grief. His dark eyes--they were, the poet decided, like
the depths of a pine-wood: dark blackish-brown, with undertones of dark
green--were like those of a dog that has been run over. No one else
seemed to notice anything wrong; at the pension one woman had remarked
casually that Mr. Gardiner was looking seedy, that was all; but then no
one but Lettice held the key.
If his frankness surprised her, it surprised himself more, for he had
by no means intended to mention Dorothea. He sheered off the subject
in a hurry. "I've been up here most evenings lately," he said. "Madame
Hasquin has a bureau on which I've set my heart; she means me to
have it in the end, but I can't get her to terms. No, it's not the
money, it's the fun--sheer delight in bargaining. I don't mind. It's
rather jolly up here in the evenings, you get the sunset; and it's
soul-refreshingly lonely. This wood--you'd never guess there was a
house within five minutes, would you? Stand still a moment."
He laid his hand on her arm to detain her, and the silence fell on them
like a pall. Not a leaf stirred; the firs raised their black spikes
rigid against the sky, some erect, some doubled and contorted like
ogres. Brambles, crouching low, thrust out long stealthy clutching
claws across the track. The sky was golden, and gold were the strips of
water lying in the ruts, winding away to the open hill and safety; but
the wood was dark, dark, and already in its depths, here and there, a
glow-worm had lit its tiny keen speck of unearthly fire, glass-green,
steady, burning but unconsumed. "That's the way to the cave," murmured
Gardiner, his voice dropping, his grip tightening on her arm. "_Cosas
de brujas_--witches, I mean. Never tell me a wood isn't alive!"
He meant it. Lettice, who professed to be stolid, found herself
responding to his fancy with an involuntary thrill. There _was_
something wrong about the place; it had its finger on its lip; it
seemed to hold a secret of its own, to threaten them with it, to jeer
at their unforeseeing ignorance.
The silence was broken by a sudden outburst of merry childish laughter
and the sharp barks of a dog. Gardiner laughed too, releasing her.
"And now come on. Round this corner--mind the gate, it'll pinch your
fingers, better let me. There: what do you think of that?"
They were clear of the wood and out on the open hill-side, looking
down into a valley, a green crease among velvet-green hills softly
molded, falling away to a line of trees, among which tinkled the
crystal cascades of a brook. On the upward slope beyond rose a group
of buildings. A round squat tower, a line of loopholed wall; the
low white front of a dwelling-house, rising among golden ricks; the
flickering brightness of a bonfire, a tall, slender ribbon of golden
incandescence, burning in a golden fume, gilding the dark branches of
the orchard, loosing flakes of flame and drifts of lavender-gray smoke
into the lavender-blue of the sky. Two children and a dog were dancing
round it, feeding it with masses of golden bracken; it was their
laughter which had broken into the enchanted wood.
"When the Bellevue started life as a convent, that was the convent
farm," said Gardiner. "Fortified--Lord, yes, they needed forts in those
days; it dates from Spanish times. Didn't you know that? There's not
much of the old stuff left in my Bellevue, bar the gateway and the
_salle_, which is substantially the old refectory. But that old tower
down there is pretty much as it was in the beginning. Ferme de la
Croix, they call it; Convent of the Holy Cross, you'd say, but I don't
myself believe that's the origin of the name. Come on down and I'll
show you."
Lettice had not contributed much in words to the conversation, but she
had done her part for all that, in following the quick turns of his
mind. They went down, crossed a bridge built of slabs of uncut stone,
and were greeted at the door by a woman of fifty who looked seventy.
She had not a tooth in her head; it was hard to believe she was the
mother and not the grandmother of the two tow-headed children. "Eh,
monsieur, quelles nouvelles?" But the sweetness of her smile redeemed
the plainness of her face.
Gardiner followed her down a white passage, not one line of which was
true, into a low-pitched, pleasant living-room, with scarlet geraniums
in the window. There beside the open hearth stood the bureau, black
as bog oak and richly carved, with shining brass handles on drawers
that slipped in and out at the touch of a finger. Madame chattered in
her abominable Walloon French, Gardiner laughed and argued back; it
was sadly plain to Lettice, who could distinguish such niceties, that
he had picked up the accent of the country. There are disadvantages
in being imitative. They came to the question of price, and Lettice,
feeling herself _de trop_, withdrew to the open door. She waited there,
between rose and crimson hollyhocks, making love to a lean flanked
sandy cat who rushed effusively out of the stable-yard, and reared
herself on hind legs to press her hard head against the visitor's
hand. The children had disappeared, but their voices were heard in
the orchard. In the west, soft bluish clouds were floating on lakes
of burning rose. A big star was born above the dark spires of the
enchanted wood, keen silver in the faint and fading gold.
Gardiner came out in high good-humor. "You've brought me luck," he
said. "Madame's given in at last. I've had my eye on the bureau ever
since the first time I came up here--haven't I, madame? And now, when's
the four-poster coming? When I've been at you about it for another
couple of years--is that the idea?"
"Jamis, ja-_mais_," said madame, vigorously shaking her head, laughing
all over her wrinkles. "Non, monsieur, non. Je tiens à mon lit,
savez-vous!"
"Et moi aussi, j'y tiens, et je vas l'avoir, savez-vous?" Gardiner
laughed back, cheerfully ungrammatical. He laid his hand again on
Lettice's arm--a small elegant brown hand: in nothing was he more
un-English than in the shape and size of his hands and feet: Lettice
looked down on it with an insulted expression which was quite wasted,
as he wheeled her round to face the house--"Here's what I said I'd show
you; it really is rather queer. That stone above the arch--do you see?"
The farm had a square-shouldered doorway; the headpiece was a single
massive block of stone. Deep carved thereon, in the same old-fashioned
numerals which appeared on the lintel of the Bellevue, was the same
date: 1548. Above the date was lettering, moss-grown and indistinct.
"Can you read it?" asked Gardiner.
Was there anything requiring eyes which Lettice could not read? "Manuel
de la Cruz," she spelt out.
"Cruz," Gardiner corrected her, giving to the "z" its soft Castilian
lisp. "Now I do not in the least believe the convent, and consequently
this farm, was dedicated to the Holy Cross. I believe it was named for
its founder. But the odd part of the story is that it's my name as
well. My mother was half Spanish--born Florentina de la Cruz; and I'm
called after her: Henry de la Cruz Gardiner."
"Well, that is queer," said Lettice, for once with conviction.
"Isn't it? There aren't so many traces left of the Spanish occupation;
I call it something of a coincidence that that should have survived,
and that I should come on it--should actually take over and settle
down in the house built by my namesake. Of course it's a not uncommon
name in Spain, but it does set one thinking. And see here, too." He
dragged her across to the tower. The gateway was half ruinous; one of
the jambs had fallen, bringing some of the stones along with it, and
others seemed ready to follow. "No, this isn't war's alarms, though as
a matter of fact I have found a cannon ball embedded in the barn. Jules
backed the engine into it the other day. This lintel's all cock-eye,
but you can still see the cross and initials--can you?--carved on the
end here." He was tracing out the mark.
"Take care!" said Lettice suddenly.
She was too late. The stone above--perhaps he had brushed against it;
at any rate, it settled down, quietly and inexorably, grinding his
hand between itself and the block below. Lettice's arm sprang out; she
could be quick on occasion, but he was quicker still. "No! keep off!"
he cried out, instantly fending her off, shouldering her out of the
way; and in the same breath he inserted the point of his stick into the
crevice. A very slight leverage, and the upper stone tipped and fell to
the ground, in a shower of dust and rubble. He drew away his hand and
stepped back. "They ought to have that seen to, I'll warn madame," he
said. "It's jolly dangerous, with those kids about."
"You've hurt yourself," said Lettice.
"Yes, I've done myself proud this time," he said, and coolly put his
hand behind his back. "Don't look at it, it isn't pretty. I'll cut in
and get some warm water out of madame, and do it up."
He turned and walked off to the house. Unfortunately, in turning
he forgot that his hand was behind him, and Lettice saw it. It was
dripping blood; he left his trail across the golden straw to the
door. Lettice stayed where she was. She was not going where she was
not wanted. She felt a little sick; not for the sight of blood, but
in sympathy with him. She had seen him change color. Yet he was cool
enough; she could hear his voice inside, answering madame's exclamation
as lightly as ever. Presently he came out again, with a white-bandaged
paw, and a face not much less pallid than the linen.
"Thanks so much for not fussing," he said. "I had a gay ten minutes
with madame; I thought she was going to embrace me. Let's get on home
now, do you mind? All this bobbery has taken the dickens of a time, and
I've masses of things still to do before dinner."
Lettice fell in beside him without a word. For once in her life, she
walked fast. Gardiner was silent too, twirling his stick in his left
hand instead of the right. They had reached the hill of the crucifix,
and were descending the orchard, before Lettice opened her lips.
"You won't be able to write your letters. How will you manage?"
He shrugged his shoulders. "Make shift with my left hand, I suppose."
"You'd better let me do them for you."
"It's nearly eight o'clock. Time for you to have your supper and go to
by-by."
"I don't always go to bed at nine," said Lettice.
"Would you really be so good as to do it, for once?"
"Of course."
"Servidor de ustéd, señorita," said Gardiner, "que sus piés besa--your
servant, madam, who kisses your feet: I don't know why I want to
talk Spanish to you, but I undoubtedly do--I shall be inexpressibly
grateful."