"There's rather a glare now we're out of the wood, and it's not
particularly pretty here."
William agreed whole-heartedly--adding, however, as a rider, that a rest
was desirable before they started homeward, and that if they went as far
as the rise in the ground a hundred yards to their right they would
probably have quite a good view, and he expected there would be a nice
breeze. In accordance with these expectations they mounted the knoll,
found the breeze and the view they expected, and subsided in the shade
of a bush. If they had but known it, they were the last tourists of
their race who for many and many a day to come were to look on the scene
before them. Had they but known it, they would certainly have scanned
it more keenly; as it was, they surveyed the wide landscape contentedly,
but with no particular enthusiasm. On every side of them were the
rounded uplands--a table-land gently swelling and cleft here and there
by wooded valleys. On their right was the deep cleft from which they
had mounted through the woods; and before them the ground dropped
sharply to the edge of a cliff, the boundary of a wider cleft running at
right angles to their own green valley of silence. It was along this
wider cleft that the railway ran, the little branch line that to-morrow
(so they thought) was to take them on the first stage of their journey.
From their perch on the hill-top they could see the three ribbons of
dark track, white road and shadowed river which between them filled the
valley. The wall of rock jutted forward on their left, hiding, as they
knew, the wayside railway station at which they had arrived and the
cluster of neat houses beside it; to the right again there was a bend no
less sharp--and between the two a stretch of empty road.
"It's very pretty," said Griselda, yawning and fanning herself, "but I
wish it wasn't quite so hot. I suppose there's nothing left to drink?"
William was sorry there wasn't--they had finished the last drop at
lunch. Griselda sighed, stretched herself out on her elbow, with her
face towards the eastern bluff, and saw coming round it a group of three
or four horsemen--little toy-like horses, carrying little toy men past
trees that looked like bushes. They were moving quickly; the toy-like
horses were cantering on the white ribbon of road. Griselda pointed them
out to William, and the pair leaned forward to watch them pass, hundreds
of feet below.
"They're scampering along," she said; "they must be in a hurry. What
funny little things they look from here--like insects! They'll be out
of sight in a minute--no, they've stopped.... I believe they're turning
back."
The funny little things had halted simultaneously at the foot of the
jutting cliff which hid the village and the station from the eyes of
William and Griselda. As Griselda had said, in another moment they would
have been round it and out of sight, and fifty more yards or so beyond
the bend would have brought them to the outskirts of the village.
Instead, they halted and drew together for an instant; then one funny
little thing, detaching himself from the group, scampered backwards by
the road he had come, and continued scampering till he rounded the
eastward bluff. His insects of companions remained grouped where he had
left them, their horses shifting backwards and forwards on the white
surface of the road.
"They're waiting for him to come back," Griselda concluded idly, "I
expect they've forgotten something."
What they had forgotten proved to be a column of horsemen curving in
swift and orderly fashion round the foot of the eastward bluff. It came
on, a supple and decorative line, bending with the bend and
straightening as the valley straightened.
"Soldiers," said William, with the orthodox accent of
contempt--following with a pleasure he would not for worlds have
admitted the sinuous windings of the troop. There is in the orderly
movement of men an attraction which few can resist; it appealed even to
his elementary sense of the rhythmic, and he, like Griselda, bent
forward to watch and to listen to the distant clatter of hoofs echoed
back from the walls of the valley. As the horsemen swung out of sight
round the westward bluff and the clatter of hoof-beats deadened, he held
up a finger, and Griselda asked, "What is it?"
"Guns," he said. "Cannon--don't you hear them?"
She did; a soft, not unpleasing thud, repeated again and again, and
coming down the breeze from the northward.
"It must be manoeuvres," he explained. "That's what those soldiers are
doing. I expect it's what they call the autumn manoeuvres."
"Playing at murder," Griselda commented, producing the orthodox sigh.
She had heard the phrase used by a pacifist orator in the Park and
considered it apt and telling. "What a waste of time--and what a
brutalizing influence on the soldiers themselves! Ah, if only women had
a say in national affairs!" ... and she made the customary glib oration
on her loved and familiar text. Before it was quite finished, William
held up his finger again--needlessly, for Griselda had stopped short on
her own initiative. This time it was a crackle of sharp little shots,
not far away and softened like the sound of the heavier guns, but
comparatively close at hand and, if their ears did not deceive them,
just beyond the westward bluff.
"They're pretending to fight in the village," Griselda said. "How
silly! Firing off guns and making believe to shoot people."
"Militarism," William assented, "is always silly." And he, in his turn,
enlarged on his favourite text, the impossibility of international
warfare, owing to the ever-growing solidarity of the European
working-classes--his little homily being punctuated here and there by a
further crackle from below. When he had enlarged sufficiently and
Griselda had duly agreed, he returned as it were to private life and
suggested:
"If you're feeling more rested, shall we make a start? It's cooler
under the trees."
They started, accordingly, on their homeward way, which was even longer
than the route they had taken in the morning: one little wood path was
very like another and they managed to take a wrong turning, bear too
much to the right and make a considerable detour. When the cottage came
in sight they were both thirsty, and secretly relieved that their last
excursion was over.
"We'll put on the spirit-lamp and have some tea," Griselda announced as
they pushed open the door. "Oh dear! it's lovely to think we shall be
in London so soon. How I would love a strawberry ice! Where's the
match-box?"
It was not until the match-box was found and the spirit-lamp kindled
that William discovered on the kitchen table a mystery in the shape of a
document. It was an unimposing looking document, not over clean,
indicted in pencil on the reverse of the half-sheet of paper on which
William that morning had written his announcement of "_Sorti_." Like
William's announcement, the communication was in French, of a
kind--presumably uneducated French if one judged by the writing; and
like William the author of the communication (in all likelihood Madame
Peys) had placed it in the centre of the table and crowned it with a
saucer before leaving.
"I suppose it must be for us," William remarked doubtfully. "I can't
make out a word of it--can you?"
"Of course not," Griselda returned with a spice of irritation--she was
tired and her boots hurt her. "I couldn't read that ridiculous writing
if it was English. It's that silly old woman, Madame Peys, I suppose;
but what is the good of her writing us letters when she knows we can't
read them?"
"Perhaps," William suggested, "it's to say she won't be able to cook our
supper to-night?"
"Very likely," his wife agreed, the spice of irritation still more
pronounced. "If that's it, we shall have to do with eggs--we used up
the cold meat for sandwiches at lunch, and there's nothing else in the
house. We'd better go round to the farm when we've had our tea and find
out what she wants--stupid old thing! Whether she comes here or not, we
must see her to get the bill and order the boy for the morning. But I
don't mean to move another step till I've had my tea."
*CHAPTER V*
They had their tea, Griselda with her boots off and her aching feet
resting on a chair; and after she had lapped up two comfortable cups her
irritation subsided and she was once again her pleasant and chattering
little self. William, to give her a further rest, volunteered, though
with some hesitation, to make the visit to the farm alone; in his mind,
as in her own, Griselda was the French scholar of the pair, a reputation
due to the fact that it was she to whom Madame Peys preferred, as a
rule, to address her unintelligible remarks. Griselda knew what the
offer cost him and generously declined to take advantage of
it--stipulating only for a few minutes more repose before encasing her
weary feet again in boots. The few minutes drew out into half-an-hour
or more, and the shadows were lengthening in the valley when they
started on their walk to the farm. They started arm-in-arm, the wife
leaning on the husband; but when they came in sight of the house
Griselda took her arm from William's and they drew a little apart.
They need not have troubled to observe the minor proprieties; not a soul
stirred, not a nose showed itself as they opened the little wooden gate
of the garden and made for the open door. They were both of them
unobservant of country sights and sounds, and it was not until they had
knocked in vain on the open door and called in vain on the name of
Madame Peys that they were struck by the absence of the usual noises of
the farm. There was neither lowing of cows nor crowing and clucking of
poultry; and the nondescript of a dog who usually heralded the approach
of a visitor by strangling tugs at his chain and vociferous canine
curses, for once had allowed their advent to pass unchallenged. They
realized suddenly that there was a strange silence from the kennel and
turned simultaneously to look at it.
"It's odd," said William. "I suppose they've all gone out, and taken
the dog with them."
"Where are the cocks and hens?" said Griselda suddenly. As if in answer
to her query, a scraggy pullet at the awkward age appeared on the top of
the farmyard gate, flapped groundwards and proceeded to investigate the
neighbouring soil with a series of businesslike pecks. Their eyes
turned towards the yard whence the pullet had emerged in search of her
usual bevy of feathered companions; but the satisfied cluck of the bird
as she sampled a seed remained unechoed and unanswered and brought no
comrade to the spot. Obviously the family excursion was unlikely to be
accompanied by a lengthy procession of poultry; and moved by a common
impulse of wonder William and Griselda made for the gate and surveyed
the farmyard beyond ... The doors of byre and stable were standing wide,
untenanted either by horse or by cow, and the two farm-carts had
vanished. There was a small dark square in the corner of the yard
marking the spot where yesterday an imprisoned mother had kept watch and
ward over a baker's dozen of attractive yellow downlings; now the dark
square was the only trace of mother, chicks and cell.
"I wish," said William, "that we could read what's written on that
paper. What can have happened to them all?"
"What's happened to them is that they've gone," Griselda returned with
decision. "And gone for a good long time--people don't take their cows
and chickens and cart-horses with them when they go for a week-end. I
suppose they're moving and taking another farm."
"Ye-es?" William agreed doubtfully. "But I shouldn't have thought
they'd have moved at such short notice--with all those animals. Of
course, if they're moving, they'll come back for what they've
left--those spades and the wheelbarrow and the furniture. There are a
lot of things still in the kitchen ... they may come to fetch them
to-night."
"They're sure to," his wife said hopefully. "Besides, Madame Peys would
never leave us without milk or provisions for the morning--she's much
too considerate. I daresay the new farm isn't far off, and she'll
either come herself or send Philippe. Then we must explain about the
train to-morrow morning."
William, still doubtful in spite of Griselda's optimism, paused at the
half-open door of the kitchen, pushed it more widely ajar and surveyed
the interior in detail.
"They must have started in rather a hurry," he commented.
The comment was justified by the disordered appearance of the room,
suggesting a departure anything but leisurely and packing anything but
methodical. There was an arm-chair upturned by the hearth where the
ashes of the wood fire still glowed and reddened in places, but all the
other chairs had vanished. The heavy table was still in the centre of
the room, but a smaller one had gone, and several pans were missing from
the row that shimmered on the wall opposite the fireplace. The canary's
cage and the clock on the mantelpiece had departed; and the china
cupboard standing wide open was rifled of part of its
contents--apparently a random selection. On the floor in one corner was
a large chequered table-cloth knotted into a bundle and containing,
judging by its bulges, a collection of domestic objects of every shape
known to the housewife. It lay discarded at the foot of the stairs like
a bursting and badly cooked pudding; its formidable size and unwieldy
contour accounting in themselves for the household's decision to abandon
it ... There was about the place--as in all dismantled or partially
dismantled rooms--an indefinite suggestion of melancholy; William and
Griselda were conscious of its influence as they stood in the centre of
the kitchen which they had hitherto known only as a model of orderly
arrangement.
"I wonder how long they will be," Griselda said, as she and her husband
came out into the dying sunlight. "It isn't any good hanging about
here; if nobody has turned up we can stroll down again after supper ...
I wonder if I could make an omelette--I've often watched her do it, and
it doesn't seem so very difficult. How lonely that chicken looks poking
about by itself."
Her eye followed the gawky pullet as it clucked and pecked in its
loneliness about the vegetable garden--and suddenly her hand shot out
and caught at her husband's arm.
"William," she said in a queer little whisper, "what's that?"
"What?" William queried, half-startled by the clutch and the whisper.
"Don't you see?--that heap ... beyond the gooseberry bushes!"
He looked where she pointed, and she felt him thrill, as she herself had
thrilled when her hand went out to his arm; neither spoke as they went
towards the end of the garden, instinctively hushing their footsteps ...
The soft earth beyond the gooseberry bushes had been heaped into a long
mound, and the solitary pullet was clucking and pecking at the side of a
new-made grave.
They stood looking down at it in silence--dumb and uneasily fearful in
the presence of a mystery beyond their powers of fathoming. The empty,
untidy house behind them was suddenly a threat and a shadow; so was the
loneliness and all-enclosing silence of the valley ... The damp garden
earth was still fresh and black from its turning; whoever lay under it
could have lain but an hour or two; and, lest the unmistakable shape of
the mound should fail to indicate what it covered, some one had laid on
it a red spray torn from a rose-bush and with a stick and a knot of
string had fashioned a cross for the head. Two crossed hazel shoots and
a handful of roses betokened that a spirit had returned to the God Who
gave it.
As they stood at the graveside in the peace of the evening, the constant
mutter of distant guns sent a low-spoken threat along the valley; but
they were too much engrossed in their thoughts and surroundings to give
it ear or heed, and it was the pullet who roused them from their stupor
of dumb astonishment. Encouraged by their stillness, she drew near,
surveyed the mound and with a flap of her clipped wings alighted under
the cross. William instinctively bent forward to "shoo" her away, and
as she fled protesting to a safer neighbourhood the husband and wife for
the first time moved and spoke.
"What can have happened?" Griselda whispered. "Do you think----
William, you don't think there has been a murder?"
William shook his head, though not with excess of confidence. "There's
the cross," he objected, "and the roses. A murderer would hardly put
roses----"
"I don't know," Griselda whispered back. "You hear of criminals doing
such strange things--and perhaps it was done hastily, in a quarrel, and
the murderer repented at once.... For all we know that paper on our
kitchen table may be a confession.... I wonder whose grave it is--if
it's one of the Peys. It's so odd their all having gone--there must be
something wrong.... You don't suppose they've gone off to hide
themselves?"
William reminded her of the absence of the farm-yard stock--and she
admitted that a family seeking to elude justice would hardly be so
foolish as to attempt to conceal itself from the police in the company
of seven cows, two cart-horses and an entire colony of poultry. Nor,
when untrodden woods lay around them, would they call attention to the
crime by placing the grave of their victim in a prominent position in
the garden; while it was difficult to think of the Peys family, as they
had known them, as murderers and accomplices of murderers: the old lady
so cheery and shrewd, her son and his wife so unintelligibly friendly,
and Philippe so loutishly good-natured.
For a while a gruesome fascination held them to the side of the
grave--and then Griselda quivered and said suddenly, "Let's go home."
They walked away softly and closed the gate softly behind them; and,
once they were well beyond it, instinctively quickened their footsteps.
They walked arm-in-arm, speaking little, on their way back to the
cottage, and it was not until they were almost on the threshold of their
solitary homestead that it struck them that perhaps they would only be
fulfilling their legal duty by informing the local authorities of the
presence of the new-made grave. They discussed the idea, considered it,
and after discussion rejected it: for one thing, there was the language
difficulty, for another the natural shrinking of the foreigner from
entangling himself in unknown processes of law--involving possible
detention for the purpose of giving evidence. They decided that it
would be better for the present to await events, and hope for the return
of some member of the vanished family.
In after days, when after events had given him a clue, William framed
his solution to the mystery of the grave and the empty farmhouse--a
solution which perhaps was not correct as to detail but was certainly
right in substance. Some fleeing Belgian, wounded to death, had found
strength to outrun or outride the Uhlan, and seeking a refuge in the
hidden valley had brought his news to the farmhouse, and died after
giving it utterance. Those who heard it had buried him in haste, and
straightway fled from the invader--fled clumsily, with horse and cart
and cattle, leaving their scribbled, unreadable warning to the absent
tenants of the cottage. Whether they fled far and successfully, or
whether they were overtaken and in due course held fast behind the
barrier of flesh and iron that shut off the German and his conquests
from the rest of the civilized world--that William and Griselda never
knew.
In the meantime, unfurnished with any clue, unknowing of the wild fury
that in its scathing of the civilized world was shattering their most
cherished illusions, they sought in vain for an explanation,
and--without putting the fact into words--lit the lamp earlier than
usual and took care to bolt the door. Usually it was fastened only on
the latch, so that Madame could let herself in with the early morning;
but to-night the darkness was unfriendly and the lonely valley held they
knew not what of threatening.
Griselda, uneasily pondering on other matters, had no mind to give to
the experiment of an omelette, and their supper was plain boiled
eggs--boiled hard while she sat with wrinkled brow, unheeding of the
flight of minutes. While they supped, their ears were always on the
alert for a footstep or a hail from without; and perhaps for that reason
they noticed as they had never noticed before the faint ghostly noises
of the country--the night-calling bird and the shiver of leaves when the
air stirred and sighed. They talked with effort and frequent pause, and
with now and again a glance thrown sideways at the open window and the
forest blackness behind it; there were no blinds to the windows, and but
for the still, heavy heat they would have fastened the shutters and
barred out the forest blackness. Perhaps they would have borne with the
heat of a closed room had not both been ashamed to confess their fear of
the window. In both their minds was the sense of being very far removed
from humanity, the knowledge that between them and humanity was a lonely
path and a house with its doors set open--a house deserted and half
dismantled with a nameless grave before it. Unimaginative as they both
were, they pictured the grave in the darkness with its roughly tied
cross and its handful of wilting rosebuds.
They went upstairs earlier than usual, chiefly because they felt more
comfortable when the windows below were fastened. William, coming last
with the candle, took the added precaution of turning the key in the
door at the foot of the stairs; and Griselda, though she made no remark,
heard the click of the lock with a secret throb of relief. Upstairs they
began by a little pretence of undressing--and then Griselda, with her
hair down her back, sat close to William, with his coat off, and they
held hands and talked in undertones in the intervals of listening for a
footstep. The footstep never came; but it was not until close upon
midnight that--knowing the early habits of the former tenants of the
farm--they gave up all hope of hearing it and began to discuss their
plans for the following day, on the presumption that they must leave the
cottage and remove their luggage alone. Such unaided removal meant an
earlier uprising than they had counted on--since if Madame did not
prepare their breakfast they needs must prepare it themselves; and this
misfortune realized, they decided to sit up no longer. They went to
bed, but left the candle burning--as they said to each other, lest one
of the Peys family should knock them up during the night. Neither slept
much, partly from nervous uneasiness and partly from fear of
oversleeping; but if they had guessed what a day would bring forth,
neither would have slept at all.
*CHAPTER VI*
They had left their bedroom windows uncurtained, that the morning light
might waken them, and they were hardly later than the August sun in
opening their eyes on the world. Though they had slept but little, and
by snatches, they turned out of bed without regret; the flood of
sunlight brought warmth into their hearts and the shadowy horror of the
night before was lifted with the mists of the valley; but all the same
the place, once only faintly mysterious, was now actively malicious and
distasteful, was tainted with a lurking dread. Thus to their pleasure
at the thought of noise and London was added relief at the prospect of
escape from a solitude grown fearful since yesterday. They dressed with
haste and rising spirits; and it was with undisguised joy that they
collected their few possessions and stuffed them into their hold-alls.