She screamed faintly. "It's come at last! And it's you that brought it!"

She turned excitedly, half afraid, half angry, to Sanderson. With a

breathless sort of gasp she said it, politeness all forgotten. "I knew

it ... if you went on. I knew it. Oh! Oh!" And she cried again, "Your

talking has brought it out!" The terror that shook her voice was rather

dreadful.

But the confusion of her vehement words passed unnoticed in the first

surprise they caused. For a moment nothing happened.

"What is it you think you see, my dear?" asked her husband, startled.

Sanderson said nothing. All three leaned forward, the men still sitting,

but Mrs. Bittacy had rushed hurriedly to the window, placing herself of

a purpose, as it seemed, between her husband and the lawn. She pointed.

Her little hand made a silhouette against the sky, the yellow shawl

hanging from the arm like a cloud.

"Beyond the cedar--between it and the lilacs." The voice had lost its

shrillness; it was thin and hushed. "There ... now you see it going

round upon itself again--going back, thank God!... going back to the

Forest." It sank to a whisper, shaking. She repeated, with a great

dropping sigh of relief--"Thank God! I thought ... at first ... it was

coming here ... to us!... David ... to _you_ !"

She stepped back from the window, her movements confused, feeling in the

darkness for the support of a chair, and finding her husband's

outstretched hand instead. "Hold me, dear, hold me, please ... tight. Do

not let me go." She was in what he called afterwards "a regular state."

He drew her firmly down upon her chair again.

"Smoke, Sophie, my dear," he said quickly, trying to make his voice calm

and natural. "I see it, yes. It's smoke blowing over from the gardener's

cottage...."

"But, David,"--and there was a new horror in her whisper now--"it made a

noise. It makes it still. I hear it swishing." Some such word she

used--swishing, sishing, rushing, or something of the kind. "David, I'm

very frightened. It's something awful! That man has called it out...!"

"Hush, hush," whispered her husband. He stroked her trembling hand

beside him.

"It is in the wind," said Sanderson, speaking for the first time, very

quietly. The expression on his face was not visible in the gloom, but

his voice was soft and unafraid. At the sound of it, Mrs. Bittacy

started violently again. Bittacy drew his chair a little forward to

obstruct her view of him. He felt bewildered himself, a little, hardly

knowing quite what to say or do. It was all so very curious and sudden.

But Mrs. Bittacy was badly frightened. It seemed to her that what she

saw came from the enveloping forest just beyond their little garden. It

emerged in a sort of secret way, moving towards them as with a purpose,

stealthily, difficultly. Then something stopped it. It could not advance

beyond the cedar. The cedar--this impression remained with her

afterwards too--prevented, kept it back. Like a rising sea the Forest

had surged a moment in their direction through the covering darkness,

and this visible movement was its first wave. Thus to her mind it

seemed... like that mysterious turn of the tide that used to frighten

and mystify her in childhood on the sands. The outward surge of some

enormous Power was what she felt... something to which every instinct in

her being rose in opposition because it threatened her and hers. In that

moment she realized the Personality of the Forest... menacing.

In the stumbling movement that she made away from the window and towards

the bell she barely caught the sentence Sanderson--or was it her

husband?--murmured to himself: "It came because we talked of it; our

thinking made it aware of us and brought it out. But the cedar stops it.

It cannot cross the lawn, you see...."

All three were standing now, and her husband's voice broke in with

authority while his wife's fingers touched the bell.

"My dear, I should _not_ say anything to Thompson." The anxiety he felt

was manifest in his voice, but his outward composure had returned. "The

gardener can go...."

Then Sanderson cut him short. "Allow me," he said quickly. "I'll see if

anything's wrong." And before either of them could answer or object, he

was gone, leaping out by the open window. They saw his figure vanish

with a run across the lawn into the darkness.

A moment later the maid entered, in answer to the bell, and with her

came the loud barking of the terrier from the hall.

"The lamps," said her master shortly, and as she softly closed the door

behind her, they heard the wind pass with a mournful sound of singing

round the outer walls. A rustle of foliage from the distance passed

within it.

"You see, the wind _is_ rising. It _was_ the wind!" He put a

comforting arm about her, distressed to feel that she was trembling. But

he knew that he was trembling too, though with a kind of odd elation

rather than alarm. "And it _was_ smoke that you saw coming from

Stride's cottage, or from the rubbish heaps he's been burning in the

kitchen garden. The noise we heard was the branches rustling in the

wind. Why should you be so nervous?"

A thin whispering voice answered him:

"I was afraid for _you_, dear. Something frightened me for _you_.

That man makes me feel so uneasy and uncomfortable for his influence

upon you. It's very foolish, I know. I think... I'm tired; I feel so

overwrought and restless." The words poured out in a hurried jumble and

she kept turning to the window while she spoke.

"The strain of having a visitor," he said soothingly, "has taxed you.

We're so unused to having people in the house. He goes to-morrow." He

warmed her cold hands between his own, stroking them tenderly. More, for

the life of him, he could not say or do. The joy of a strange, internal

excitement made his heart beat faster. He knew not what it was. He knew

only, perhaps, whence it came.

She peered close into his face through the gloom, and said a curious

thing. "I thought, David, for a moment... you seemed... different. My

nerves are all on edge to-night." She made no further reference to her

husband's visitor.

A sound of footsteps from the lawn warned of Sanderson's return, as he

answered quickly in a lowered tone--"There's no need to be afraid on my

account, dear girl. There's nothing wrong with me. I assure you; I never

felt so well and happy in my life."

Thompson came in with the lamps and brightness, and scarcely had she

gone again when Sanderson in turn was seen climbing through the window.

"There's nothing," he said lightly, as he closed it behind him.

"Somebody's been burning leaves, and the smoke is drifting a little

through the trees. The wind," he added, glancing at his host a moment

significantly, but in so discreet a way that Mrs. Bittacy did not

observe it, "the wind, too, has begun to roar... in the Forest...

further out."

But Mrs. Bittacy noticed about him two things which increased her

uneasiness. She noticed the shining of his eyes, because a similar light

had suddenly come into her husband's; and she noticed, too, the apparent

depth of meaning he put into those simple words that "the wind had begun

to roar in the Forest ...further out." Her mind retained the

disagreeable impression that he meant more than he said. In his tone lay

quite another implication. It was not actually "wind" he spoke of, and

it would not remain "further out"...rather, it was coming in. Another

impression she got too--still more unwelcome--was that her husband

understood his hidden meaning.

~IV~

"David, dear," she observed gently as soon as they were alone

upstairs, "I have a horrible uneasy feeling about that man. I cannot get

rid of it." The tremor in per voice caught all his tenderness.

He turned to look at her. "Of what kind, my dear? You're so imaginative

sometimes, aren't you?"

"I think," she hesitated, stammering a little, confused, still

frightened, "I mean--isn't he a hypnotist, or full of those theosophical

ideas, or something of the sort? You know what I mean--"

He was too accustomed to her little confused alarms to explain them away

seriously as a rule, or to correct her verbal inaccuracies, but to-night

he felt she needed careful, tender treatment. He soothed her as best he

could.

"But there's no harm in that, even if he is," he answered quietly.

"Those are only new names for very old ideas, you know, dear." There was

no trace of impatience in his voice.

"That's what I mean," she replied, the texts he dreaded rising in an

unuttered crowd behind the words. "He's one of those things that we are

warned would come--one of those Latter-Day things." For her mind still

bristled with the bogeys of the Antichrist and Prophecy, and she had

only escaped the Number of the Beast, as it were, by the skin of her

teeth. The Pope drew most of her fire usually, because she could

understand him; the target was plain and she could shoot. But this

tree-and-forest business was so vague and horrible. It terrified her.

"He makes me think," she went on, "of Principalities and Powers in high

places, and of things that walk in the darkness. I did _not_ like the

way he spoke of trees getting alive in the night, and all that; it made

me think of wolves in sheep's clothing. And when I saw that awful thing

in the sky above the lawn--"

But he interrupted her at once, for that was something he had decided it

was best to leave unmentioned. Certainly it was better not discussed.

"He only meant, I think, Sophie," he put in gravely, yet with a little

smile, "that trees may have a measure of conscious life--rather a nice

idea on the whole, surely,--something like that bit we read in the Times

the other night, you remember--and that a big forest may possess a sort

of Collective Personality. Remember, he's an artist, and poetical."

"It's dangerous," she said emphatically. "I feel it's playing with fire,

unwise, unsafe--"

"Yet all to the glory of God," he urged gently. "We must not shut our

ears and eyes to knowledge--of any kind, must we?"

"With you, David, the wish is always farther than the thought," she

rejoined. For, like the child who thought that "suffered under Pontius

Pilate" was "suffered under a bunch of violets," she heard her proverbs

phonetically and reproduced them thus. She hoped to convey her warning

in the quotation. "And we must always try the spirits whether they be of

God," she added tentatively.

"Certainly, dear, we can always do that," he assented, getting into bed.

But, after a little pause, during which she blew the light out, David

Bittacy settling down to sleep with an excitement in his blood that was

new and bewilderingly delightful, realized that perhaps he had not said

quite enough to comfort her. She was lying awake by his side, still

frightened. He put his head up in the darkness.

"Sophie," he said softly, "you must remember, too, that in any case

between us and--and all that sort of thing--there is a great gulf fixed,

a gulf that cannot be crossed--er--while we are still in the body."

And hearing no reply, he satisfied himself that she was already asleep

and happy. But Mrs. Bittacy was not asleep. She heard the sentence, only

she said nothing because she felt her thought was better unexpressed.

She was afraid to hear the words in the darkness. The Forest outside was

listening and might hear them too--the Forest that was "roaring further

out."

And the thought was this: That gulf, of course, existed, but Sanderson

had somehow bridged it.

It was much later than night when she awoke out of troubled, uneasy

dreams and heard a sound that twisted her very nerves with fear. It

passed immediately with full waking, for, listen as she might, there was

nothing audible but the inarticulate murmur of the night. It was in her

dreams she heard it, and the dreams had vanished with it. But the sound

was recognizable, for it was that rushing noise that had come across the

lawn; only this time closer. Just above her face while she slept had

passed this murmur as of rustling branches in the very room, a sound of

foliage whispering. "A going in the tops of the mulberry trees," ran

through her mind. She had dreamed that she lay beneath a spreading tree

somewhere, a tree that whispered with ten thousand soft lips of green;

and the dream continued for a moment even after waking.

She sat up in bed and stared about her. The window was open at the top;

she saw the stars; the door, she remembered, was locked as usual; the

room, of course, was empty. The deep hush of the summer night lay over

all, broken only by another sound that now issued from the shadows close

beside the bed, a human sound, yet unnatural, a sound that seized the

fear with which she had waked and instantly increased it. And, although

it was one she recognized as familiar, at first she could not name it.

Some seconds certainly passed--and, they were very long ones--before she

understood that it was her husband talking in his sleep.

The direction of the voice confused and puzzled her, moreover, for it

was not, as she first supposed, beside her. There was distance in it.

The next minute, by the light of the sinking candle flame, she saw his

white figure standing out in the middle of the room, half-way towards

the window. The candle-light slowly grew. She saw him move then nearer

to the window, with arms outstretched. His speech was low and mumbled,

the words running together too much to be distinguishable.

And she shivered. To her, sleep-talking was uncanny to the point of

horror; it was like the talking of the dead, mere parody of a living

voice, unnatural.

"David!" she whispered, dreading the sound of her own voice, and half

afraid to interrupt him and see his face. She could not bear the sight

of the wide-opened eyes. "David, you're walking in your sleep. Do--come

back to bed, dear, _please!_"

Her whisper seemed so dreadfully loud in the still darkness. At the

sound of her voice he paused, then turned slowly round to face her. His

widely-opened eyes stared into her own without recognition; they looked

through her into something beyond; it was as though he knew the

direction of the sound, yet cold not see her. They were shining, she

noticed, as the eyes of Sanderson had shone several hours ago; and his

face was flushed, distraught. Anxiety was written upon every feature.

And, instantly, recognizing that the fever was upon him, she forgot her

terror temporarily in practical considerations. He came back to bed

without waking. She closed his eyelids. Presently he composed himself

quietly to sleep, or rather to deeper sleep. She contrived to make him

swallow something from the tumbler beside the bed.

Then she rose very quietly to close the window, feeling the night air

blow in too fresh and keen. She put the candle where it could not reach

him. The sight of the big Baxter Bible beside it comforted her a little,

but all through her under-being ran the warnings of a curious alarm. And

it was while in the act of fastening the catch with one hand and pulling

the string of the blind with the other, that her husband sat up again in

bed and spoke in words this time that were distinctly audible. The eyes

had opened wide again. He pointed. She stood stock still and listened,

her shadow distorted on the blind. He did not come out towards her as at

first she feared.

The whispering voice was very clear, horrible, too, beyond all she had

ever known.

"They are roaring in the Forest further out... and I... must go and

see." He stared beyond her as he said it, to the woods. "They are

needing me. They sent for me...." Then his eyes wandering back again to

things within the room, he lay down, his purpose suddenly changed. And

that change was horrible as well, more horrible, perhaps, because of its

revelation of another detailed world he moved in far away from her.

The singular phrase chilled her blood, for a moment she was utterly

terrified. That tone of the somnambulist, differing so slightly yet so

distressingly from normal, waking speech, seemed to her somehow wicked.

Evil and danger lay waiting thick behind it. She leaned against the

window-sill, shaking in every limb. She had an awful feeling for a

moment that something was coming in to fetch him.

"Not yet, then," she heard in a much lower voice from the bed, "but

later. It will be better so... I shall go later...."

The words expressed some fringe of these alarms that had haunted her so

long, and that the arrival and presence of Sanderson seemed to have

brought to the very edge of a climax she could not even dare to think

about. They gave it form; they brought it closer; they sent her thoughts

to her Deity in a wild, deep prayer for help and guidance. For here was

a direct, unconscious betrayal of a world of inner purposes and claims

her husband recognized while he kept them almost wholly to himself.

By the time she reached his side and knew the comfort of his touch, the

eyes had closed again, this time of their own accord, and the head lay

calmly back upon the pillows. She gently straightened the bed clothes.

She watched him for some minutes, shading the candle carefully with one

hand. There was a smile of strangest peace upon the face.

Then, blowing out the candle, she knelt down and prayed before getting

back into bed. But no sleep came to her. She lay awake all night

thinking, wondering, praying, until at length with the chorus of the

birds and the glimmer of the dawn upon the green blind, she fell into a

slumber of complete exhaustion.

But while she slept the wind continued roaring in the Forest further

out. The sound came closer--sometimes very close indeed.

~V~

With the departure of Sanderson the significance of the curious

incidents waned, because the moods that had produced them passed away.

Mrs. Bittacy soon afterwards came to regard them as some growth of

disproportion that had been very largely, perhaps, in her own mind. It

did not strike her that this change was sudden for it came about quite

naturally. For one thing her husband never spoke of the matter, and for

another she remembered how many things in life that had seemed

inexplicable and singular at the time turned out later to have been

quite commonplace.

Most of it, certainly, she put down to the presence of the artist and to

his wild, suggestive talk. With his welcome removal, the world turned

ordinary again and safe. The fever, though it lasted as usual a short

time only, had not allowed of her husband's getting up to say good-bye,

and she had conveyed his regrets and adieux. In the morning Mr.

Sanderson had seemed ordinary enough. In his town hat and gloves, as she

saw him go, he seemed tame and unalarming.

"After all," she thought as she watched the pony-cart bear him off,

"he's only an artist!" What she had thought he might be otherwise her

slim imagination did not venture to disclose. Her change of feeling was

wholesome and refreshing. She felt a little ashamed of her behavior. She

gave him a smile--genuine because the relief she felt was genuine--as he

bent over her hand and kissed it, but she did not suggest a second

visit, and her husband, she noted with satisfaction and relief, had said

nothing either.

The little household fell again into the normal and sleepy routine to

which it was accustomed. The name of Arthur Sanderson was rarely if ever

mentioned. Nor, for her part, did she mention to her husband the

incident of his walking in his sleep and the wild words he used. But to

forget it was equally impossible. Thus it lay buried deep within her

like a center of some unknown disease of which it was a mysterious

symptom, waiting to spread at the first favorable opportunity. She

prayed against it every night and morning: prayed that she might forget

it--that God would keep her husband safe from harm.

For in spite of much surface foolishness that many might have read as

weakness. Mrs. Bittacy had balance, sanity, and a fine deep faith. She

was greater than she knew. Her love for her husband and her God were

somehow one, an achievement only possible to a single-hearted nobility

of soul.

There followed a summer of great violence and beauty; of beauty, because

the refreshing rains at night prolonged the glory of the spring and

spread it all across July, keeping the foliage young and sweet; of

violence, because the winds that tore about the south of England brushed

the whole country into dancing movement. They swept the woods

magnificently, and kept them roaring with a perpetual grand voice. Their

deepest notes seemed never to leave the sky. They sang and shouted, and

torn leaves raced and fluttered through the air long before their

usually appointed time. Many a tree, after days of roaring and dancing,

fell exhausted to the ground. The cedar on the lawn gave up two limbs

that fell upon successive days, at the same hour too--just before dusk.

The wind often makes its most boisterous effort at that time, before it

drops with the sun, and these two huge branches lay in dark ruin

covering half the lawn. They spread across it and towards the house.

They left an ugly gaping space upon the tree, so that the Lebanon looked

unfinished, half destroyed, a monster shorn of its old-time comeliness

and splendor. Far more of the Forest was now visible than before; it

peered through the breach of the broken defenses. They could see from

the windows of the house now--especially from the drawing-room and

bedroom windows--straight out into the glades and depths beyond.

Mrs. Bittacy's niece and nephew, who were staying on a visit at the

time, enjoyed themselves immensely helping the gardeners carry off the

fragments. It took two days to do this, for Mr. Bittacy insisted on the

branches being moved entire. He would not allow them to be chopped;

also, he would not consent to their use as firewood. Under his

superintendence the unwieldy masses were dragged to the edge of the

garden and arranged upon the frontier line between the Forest and the

lawn. The children were delighted with the scheme. They entered into it

with enthusiasm. At all costs this defense against the inroads of the

Forest must be made secure. They caught their uncle's earnestness, felt

even something of a hidden motive that he had; and the visit, usually

rather dreaded, became the visit of their lives instead. It was Aunt

Sophia this time who seemed discouraging and dull.

"She's got so old and funny," opined Stephen.

But Alice, who felt in the silent displeasure of her aunt some secret

thing that alarmed her, said:

"I think she's afraid of the woods. She never comes into them with us,

you see."

"All the more reason then for making this wall impreg--all fat and thick

and solid," he concluded, unable to manage the longer word. "Then

nothing--simply _nothing_--can get through. Can't it, Uncle David?"

And Mr. Bittacy, jacket discarded and working in his speckled waistcoat,

went puffing to their aid, arranging the massive limb of the cedar like

a hedge.

"Come on," he said, "whatever happens, you know, we must finish before

it's dark. Already the wind is roaring in the Forest further out." And

Alice caught the phrase and instantly echoed it. "Stevie," she cried

below her breath, "look sharp, you lazy lump. Didn't you hear what Uncle

David said? It'll come in and catch us before we've done!"

They worked like Trojans, and, sitting beneath the wisteria tree that

climbed the southern wall of the cottage, Mrs. Bittacy with her knitting

watched them, calling from time to time insignificant messages of

counsel and advice. The messages passed, of course, unheeded. Mostly,

indeed, they were unheard, for the workers were too absorbed. She warned

her husband not to get too hot, Alice not to tear her dress, Stephen not

to strain his back with pulling. Her mind hovered between the

homeopathic medicine-chest upstairs and her anxiety to see the business

finished.

For this breaking up of the cedar had stirred again her slumbering

alarms. It revived memories of the visit of Mr. Sanderson that had been

sinking into oblivion; she recalled his queer and odious way of talking,

and many things she hoped forgotten drew their heads up from that

subconscious region to which all forgetting is impossible. They looked

at her and nodded. They were full of life; they had no intention of

being pushed aside and buried permanently. "Now look!" they whispered,

"didn't we tell you so?" They had been merely waiting the right moment

to assert their presence. And all her former vague distress crept over

her. Anxiety, uneasiness returned. That dreadful sinking of the heart

came too.

This incident of the cedar's breaking up was actually so unimportant,

and yet her husband's attitude towards it made it so significant. There

was nothing that he said in particular, or did, or left undone that

frightened, her, but his general air of earnestness seemed so

unwarranted. She felt that he deemed the thing important. He was so

exercised about it. This evidence of sudden concern and interest, buried

all the summer from her sight and knowledge, she realized now had been

buried purposely, he had kept it intentionally concealed. Deeply

submerged in him there ran this tide of other thoughts, desires, hopes.

What were they? Whither did they lead? The accident to the tree betrayed

it most unpleasantly, and, doubtless, more than he was aware.

She watched his grave and serious face as he worked there with the

children, and as she watched she felt afraid. It vexed her that the

children worked so eagerly. They unconsciously supported him. The thing

she feared she would not even name. But it was waiting.

Moreover, as far as her puzzled mind could deal with a dread so vague

and incoherent, the collapse of the cedar somehow brought it nearer. The

fact that, all so ill-explained and formless, the thing yet lay in her

consciousness, out of reach but moving and alive, filled her with a kind

of puzzled, dreadful wonder. Its presence was so very real, its power so

gripping, its partial concealment so abominable. Then, out of the dim

confusion, she grasped one thought and saw it stand quite clear before

her eyes. She found difficulty in clothing it in words, but its meaning

perhaps was this: That cedar stood in their life for something friendly;

its downfall meant disaster; a sense of some protective influence about

the cottage, and about her husband in particular, was thereby weakened.

"Why do you fear the big winds so?" he had asked her several days

before, after a particularly boisterous day; and the answer she gave

surprised her while she gave it. One of those heads poked up

unconsciously, and let slip the truth.

"Because, David, I feel they--bring the Forest with them," she faltered.

"They blow something from the trees--into the mind--into the house."

He looked at her keenly for a moment.

"That must be why I love them then," he answered. "They blow the souls

of the trees about the sky like clouds."

The conversation dropped. She had never heard him talk in quite that way

before.

And another time, when he had coaxed her to go with him down one of the

nearer glades, she asked why he took the small hand-axe with him, and

what he wanted it for.

"To cut the ivy that clings to the trunks and takes their life away," he

said.

"But can't the verdurers do that?" she asked. "That's what they're paid

for, isn't it?"

Whereupon he explained that ivy was a parasite the trees knew not how to

fight alone, and that the verdurers were careless and did not do it

thoroughly. They gave a chop here and there, leaving the tree to do the

rest for itself if it could.

"Besides, I like to do it for them. I love to help them and protect," he

added, the foliage rustling all about his quiet words as they went.

And these stray remarks, as his attitude towards the broken cedar,

betrayed this curious, subtle change that was going forward to his

personality. Slowly and surely all the summer it had increased.

It was growing--the thought startled her horribly--just as a tree grows,

the outer evidence from day to day so slight as to be unnoticeable, yet

the rising tide so deep and irresistible. The alteration spread all

through and over him, was in both mind and actions, sometimes almost in

his face as well. Occasionally, thus, it stood up straight outside

himself and frightened her. His life was somehow becoming linked so

intimately with trees, and with all that trees signified. His interests

became more and more their interests, his activity combined with theirs,

his thoughts and feelings theirs, his purpose, hope, desire, his fate--

His fate! The darkness of some vague, enormous terror dropped its shadow

on her when she thought of it. Some instinct in her heart she dreaded

infinitely more than death--for death meant sweet translation for his

soul--came gradually to associate the thought of him with the thought of

trees, in particular with these Forest trees. Sometimes, before she

could face the thing, argue it away, or pray it into silence, she found

the thought of him running swiftly through her mind like a thought of

the Forest itself, the two most intimately linked and joined together,

each a part and complement of the other, one being.

The idea was too dim for her to see it face to face. Its mere

possibility dissolved the instant she focused it to get the truth behind

it. It was too utterly elusive, made, protæan. Under the attack of even

a minute's concentration the very meaning of it vanished, melted away.

The idea lay really behind any words that she could ever find, beyond

the touch of definite thought.

Her mind was unable to grapple with it. But, while it vanished, the

trail of its approach and disappearance flickered a moment before her

shaking vision. The horror certainly remained.

Reduced to the simple human statement that her temperament sought

instinctively, it stood perhaps at this: Her husband loved her, and he

loved the trees as well; but the trees came first, claimed parts of him

she did not know. _She_ loved her God and him. _He_ loved the trees

and her.

Thus, in guise of some faint, distressing compromise, the matter shaped

itself for her perplexed mind in the terms of conflict. A silent, hidden

battle raged, but as yet raged far away. The breaking of the cedar was a

visible outward fragment of a distant and mysterious encounter that was

coming daily closer to them both. The wind, instead of roaring in the

Forest further out, now cam nearer, booming in fitful gusts about its

edge and frontiers.

Meanwhile the summer dimmed. The autumn winds went sighing through the

woods, leaves turned to golden red, and the evenings were drawing in

with cozy shadows before the first sign of anything seriously untoward

made its appearance. It came then with a flat, decided kind of violence

that indicated mature preparation beforehand. It was not impulsive nor

ill-considered. In a fashion it seemed expected, and indeed inevitable.

For within a fortnight of their annual change to the little village of

Seillans above St. Raphael--a change so regular for the past ten years

that it was not even discussed between them--David Bittacy abruptly

refused to go.

Thompson had laid the tea-table, prepared the spirit lamp beneath the

urn, pulled down the blinds in that swift and silent way she had, and

left the room. The lamps were still unlit. The fire-light shone on the

chintz armchairs, and Boxer lay asleep on the black horse-hair rug. Upon

the walls the gilt picture frames gleamed faintly, the pictures

themselves indistinguishable. Mrs. Bittacy had warmed the teapot and was

in the act of pouring the water in to heat the cups when her husband,

looking up from his chair across the hearth, made the abrupt

announcement:

"My dear," he said, as though following a train of thought of which she

only heard this final phrase, "it's really quite impossible for me to

go."

And so abrupt, inconsequent, it sounded that she at first misunderstood.

She thought he meant to go out into the garden or the woods. But her

heart leaped all the same. The tone of his voice was ominous.

"Of course not," she answered, "it would be _most_ unwise. Why should

you--?" She referred to the mist that always spread on autumn nights

upon the lawn, but before she finished the sentence she knew that _he_

referred to something else. And her heart then gave its second horrible

leap.

"David! You mean abroad?" she gasped.

"I mean abroad, dear, yes."

It reminded her of the tone he used when saying good-bye years ago,

before one of those jungle expeditions she dreaded. His voice then was

so serious, so final. It was serious and final now. For several moments

she could think of nothing to say. She busied herself with the teapot.

She had filled one cup with hot water till it overflowed, and she

emptied it slowly into the slop-basin, trying with all her might not to

let him see the trembling of her hand. The firelight and the dimness of

the room both helped her. But in any case he would hardly have noticed

it. His thoughts were far away....

~VI~

Mrs. Bittacy had never liked their present home. She preferred a flat,

more open country that left approaches clear. She liked to see things

coming. This cottage on the very edge of the old hunting grounds of

William the Conqueror had never satisfied her ideal of a safe and

pleasant place to settle down in. The sea-coast, with treeless downs

behind and a clear horizon in front, as at Eastbourne, say, was her

ideal of a proper home.

It was curious, this instinctive aversion she felt to being shut in--by

trees especially; a kind of claustrophobia almost; probably due, as has

been said, to the days in India when the trees took her husband off and

surrounded him with dangers. In those weeks of solitude the feeling had

matured. She had fought it in her fashion, but never conquered it.

Apparently routed, it had a way of creeping back in other forms. In this

particular case, yielding to his strong desire, she thought the battle

won, but the terror of the trees came back before the first month had

passed. They laughed in her face.

She never lost knowledge of the fact that the leagues of forest lay

about their cottage like a mighty wall, a crowding, watching, listening

presence that shut them in from freedom and escape. Far from morbid

naturally, she did her best to deny the thought, and so simple and

unartificial was her type of mind that for weeks together she would

wholly lose it. Then, suddenly it would return upon her with a rush of

bleak reality. It was not only in her mind; it existed apart from any

mere mood; a separate fear that walked alone; it came and went, yet when

it went--went only to watch her from another point of view. It was in

abeyance--hidden round the corner.

The Forest never let her go completely. It was ever ready to encroach.

All the branches, she sometimes fancied, stretched one way--towards

their tiny cottage and garden, as though it sought to draw them in and

merge them in itself. Its great, deep-breathing soul resented the

mockery, the insolence, the irritation of the prim garden at its very

gates. It would absorb and smother them if it could. And every wind that

blew its thundering message over the huge sounding-board of the million,

shaking trees conveyed the purpose that it had. They had angered its

great soul. At its heart was this deep, incessant roaring.

All this she never framed in words, the subtleties of language lay far

beyond her reach. But instinctively she felt it; and more besides. It

troubled her profoundly. Chiefly, moreover, for her husband. Merely for

herself, the nightmare might have left her cold. It was David's peculiar

interest in the trees that gave the special invitation. Jealousy, then,

in its most subtle aspect came to strengthen this aversion and dislike,

for it came in a form that no reasonable wife could possibly object to.

Her husband's passion, she reflected, was natural and inborn. It had

decided his vocation, fed his ambition, nourished his dreams, desires,

hopes. All his best years of active life had been spent in the care and

guardianship of trees. He knew them, understood their secret life and

nature, "managed" them intuitively as other men "managed" dogs and

horses. He could not live for long away from them without a strange,

acute nostalgia that stole his peace of mind and consequently his

strength of body. A forest made him happy and at peace; it nursed and

fed and soothed his deepest moods. Trees influenced the sources of his

life, lowered or raised the very heart-beat in him. Cut off from them he

languished as a lover of the sea can droop inland, or a mountaineer may

pine in the flat monotony of the plains.

This she could understand, in a fashion at least, and make allowances

for. She had yielded gently, even sweetly, to his choice of their

English home; for in the little island there is nothing that suggests

the woods of wilder countries so nearly as the New Forest. It has the

genuine air and mystery, the depth and splendor, the loneliness, and

there and there the strong, untamable quality of old-time forests as

Bittacy of the Department knew them.

In a single detail only had he yielded to her wishes. He consented to a

cottage on the edge, instead of in the heart of it. And for a dozen

years now they had dwelt in peace and happiness at the lips of this

great spreading thing that covered so many leagues with its tangle of

swamps and moors and splendid ancient trees.

Only with the last two years or so--with his own increasing age, and

physical decline perhaps--had come this marked growth of passionate

interest in the welfare of the Forest. She had watched it grow, at first

had laughed at it, then talked sympathetically so far as sincerity

permitted, then had argued mildly, and finally come to realize that its

treatment lay altogether beyond her powers, and so had come to fear it

with all her heart.

The six weeks they annually spent away from their English home, each

regarded very differently, of course. For her husband it meant a painful

exile that did his health no good; he yearned for his trees--the sight

and sound and smell of them; but for herself it meant release from a

haunting dread--escape. To renounce those six weeks by the sea on the

sunny, shining coast of France, was almost more than this little woman,

even with her unselfishness, could face.

After the first shock of the announcement, she reflected as deeply as

her nature permitted, prayed, wept in secret--and made up her mind.

Duty, she felt clearly, pointed to renouncement. The discipline would

certainly be severe--she did not dream at the moment how severe!--but

this fine, consistent little Christian saw it plain; she accepted it,

too, without any sighing of the martyr, though the courage she showed

was of the martyr order. Her husband should never know the cost. In all

but this one passion his unselfishness was ever as great as her own. The

love she had borne him all these years, like the love she bore her

anthropomorphic deity, was deep and real. She loved to suffer for them

both. Besides, the way her husband had put it to her was singular. It

did not take the form of a mere selfish predilection. Something higher

than two wills in conflict seeking compromise was in it from the

beginning.

"I feel, Sophia, it would be really more than I could manage," he said

slowly, gazing into the fire over the tops of his stretched-out muddy

boots. "My duty and my happiness lie here with the Forest and with you.

My life is deeply rooted in this place. Something I can't define

connects my inner being with these trees, and separation would make me

ill--might even kill me. My hold on life would weaken; here is my source

of supply. I cannot explain it better than that." He looked up steadily

into her face across the table so that she saw the gravity of his

expression and the shining of his steady eyes.

"David, you feel it as strongly as that!" she said, forgetting the tea

things altogether.

"Yes," he replied, "I do. And it's not of the body only, I feel it in my

soul."

The reality of what he hinted at crept into that shadow-covered room

like an actual Presence and stood beside them. It came not by the

windows or the door, but it filled the entire space between the walls

and ceiling. It took the heat from the fire before her face. She felt

suddenly cold, confused a little, frightened. She almost felt the rush

of foliage in the wind. It stood between them.

"There are things--some things," she faltered, "we are not intended to

know, I think." The words expressed her general attitude to life, not

alone to this particular incident.

And after a pause of several minutes, disregarding the criticism as

though he had not heard it--"I cannot explain it better than that, you

see," his grave voice answered. "There is this deep, tremendous

link,--some secret power they emanate that keeps me well and happy

and--alive. If you cannot understand, I feel at least you may be able

to--forgive." His tone grew tender, gentle, soft. "My selfishness, I

know, must seem quite unforgivable. I cannot help it somehow; these

trees, this ancient Forest, both seem knitted into all that makes me

live, and if I go--"

There was a little sound of collapse in his voice. He stopped abruptly,

and sank back in his chair. And, at that, a distinct lump came up into

her throat which she had great difficulty in managing while she went

over and put her arms about him.

"My dear," she murmured, "God will direct. We will accept His guidance.

He has always shown the way before."

"My selfishness afflicts me--" he began, but she would not let him

finish.

"David, He will direct. Nothing shall harm you. You've never once been

selfish, and I cannot bear to hear you say such things. The way will

open that is best for you--for both of us." She kissed him, she would

not let him speak; her heart was in her throat, and she felt for him far

more than for herself.

And then he had suggested that she should go alone perhaps for a shorter

time, and stay in her brother's villa with the children, Alice and

Stephen. It was always open to her as she well knew.

"You need the change," he said, when the lamps had been lit and the

servant had gone out again; "you need it as much as I dread it. I could

manage somehow until you returned, and should feel happier that way if

you went. I cannot leave this Forest that I love so well. I even feel,

Sophie dear"--he sat up straight and faced her as he half whispered

it--"that I can _never_ leave it again. My life and happiness lie here

together."

And eve while scorning the idea that she could leave him alone with the

Influence of the Forest all about him to have its unimpeded way, she

felt the pangs of that subtle jealousy bite keen and close. He loved the

Forest better than herself, for he placed it first. Behind the words,

moreover, hid the unuttered thought that made her so uneasy. The terror

Sanderson had brought revived and shook its wings before her very eyes.

For the whole conversation, of which this was a fragment, conveyed the

unutterable implication that while he could not spare the trees, they

equally could not spare him. The vividness with which he managed to

conceal and yet betray the fact brought a profound distress that crossed

the border between presentiment and warning into positive alarm.

He clearly felt that the trees would miss him--the trees he tended,

guarded, watched over, loved.

"David, I shall stay here with you. I think you need me really,--don't

you?" Eagerly, with a touch of heart-felt passion, the words poured out.

"Now more than ever, dear. God bless you for you sweet unselfishness.

And your sacrifice," he added, "is all the greater because you cannot

understand the thing that makes it necessary for me to stay."

"Perhaps in the spring instead--" she said, with a tremor in the voice.

"In the spring--perhaps," he answered gently, almost beneath his breath.

"For they will not need me then. All the world can love them in the

spring. It's in the winter that they're lonely and neglected. I wish to

stay with them particularly then. I even feel I ought to--and I must."

And in this way, without further speech, the decision was made. Mrs.

Bittacy, at least, asked no more questions. Yet she could not bring

herself to show more sympathy than was necessary. She felt, for one

thing, that if she did, it might lead him to speak freely, and to tell

her things she could not possibly bear to know. And she dared not take

the risk of that.

~VII~

This was at the end of summer, but the autumn followed close. The

conversation really marked the threshold between the two seasons, and

marked at the same time the line between her husband's negative and

aggressive state. She almost felt she had done wrong to yield; he grew

so bold, concealment all discarded. He went, that is, quite openly to

the woods, forgetting all his duties, all his former occupations. He

even sought to coax her to go with him. The hidden thing blazed out

without disguise. And, while she trembled at his energy, she admired the

virile passion he displayed. Her jealousy had long ago retired before

her fear, accepting the second place. Her one desire now was to protect.

The wife turned wholly mother.

He said so little, but--he hated to come in. From morning to night he

wandered in the Forest; often he went out after dinner; his mind was

charged with trees--their foliage, growth, development; their wonder,

beauty, strength; their loneliness in isolation, their power in a herded

mass. He knew the effect of every wind upon them; the danger from the

boisterous north, the glory from the west, the eastern dryness, and the

soft, moist tenderness that a south wind left upon their thinning

boughs. He spoke all day of their sensations: how they drank the fading

sunshine, dreamed in the moonlight, thrilled to the kiss of stars. The

dew could bring them half the passion of the night, but frost sent them

plunging beneath the ground to dwell with hopes of a later coming

softness in their roots. They nursed the life they carried--insects,

larvae, chrysalis--and when the skies above them melted, he spoke of

them standing "motionless in an ecstasy of rain," or in the noon of

sunshine "self-poised upon their prodigy of shade."

And once in the middle of the night she woke at the sound of his voice,

and heard him--wide awake, not talking in his sleep--but talking towards

the window where the shadow of the cedar fell at noon:

O art thou sighing for Lebanon

In the long breeze that streams to thy delicious East?

Sighing for Lebanon,

Dark cedar;

and, when, half charmed, half terrified, she turned and called to him

by name, he merely said--

"My dear, I felt the loneliness--suddenly realized it--the alien

desolation of that tree, set here upon our little lawn in England when

all her Eastern brothers call her in sleep." And the answer seemed so

queer, so "un-evangelical," that she waited in silence till he slept

again. The poetry passed her by. It seemed unnecessary and out of place.

It made her ache with suspicion, fear, jealousy.

The fear, however, seemed somehow all lapped up and banished soon

afterwards by her unwilling admiration of the rushing splendor of her

husband's state. Her anxiety, at any rate, shifted from the religious to

the medical. She thought he might be losing his steadiness of mind a

little. How often in her prayers she offered thanks for the guidance

that had made her stay with him to help and watch is impossible to say.

It certainly was twice a day.

She even went so far once, when Mr. Mortimer, the vicar, called, and

brought with him a more or less distinguished doctor--as to tell the

professional man privately some symptoms of her husband's queerness. And

his answer that there was "nothing he could prescribe for" added not a

little to her sense of unholy bewilderment. No doubt Sir James had never

been "consulted" under such unorthodox conditions before. His sense of

what was becoming naturally overrode his acquired instincts as a skilled

instrument that might help the race.

"No fever, you think?" she asked insistently with hurry, determined to

get something from him.

"Nothing that _I_ can deal with, as I told you, Madam," replied the

offended allopathic Knight.

Evidently he did not care about being invited to examine patients in

this surreptitious way before a teapot on the lawn, chance of a fee most

problematical. He liked to see a tongue and feel a thumping pulse; to

know the pedigree and bank account of his questioner as well. It was

most unusual, in abominable taste besides. Of course it was. But the

drowning woman seized the only straw she could.

For now the aggressive attitude of her husband overcame her to the point

where she found it difficult even to question him. Yet in the house he

was so kind and gentle, doing all he could to make her sacrifice as easy

as possible.

"David, you really _are_ unwise to go out now. The night is damp and

very chilly. The ground is soaked in dew. You'll catch your death of

cold."

His face lightened. "Won't you come with me, dear,--just for once? I'm

only going to the corner of the hollies to see the beech that stands so

lonely by itself."

She had been out with him in the short dark afternoon, and they had

passed that evil group of hollies where the gypsies camped. Nothing else

would grow there, but the hollies thrive upon the stony soil.

"David, the beech is all right and safe." She had learned his

phraseology a little, made clever out of due season by her love.

"There's no wind to-night."

"But it's rising," he answered, "rising in the east. I heard it in the

bare and hungry larches. They need the sun and dew, and always cry out

when the wind's upon them from the east."

She sent a short unspoken prayer most swiftly to her deity as she heard

him say it. For every time now, when he spoke in this familiar, intimate

way of the life of the trees, she felt a sheet of cold fasten tight

against her very skin and flesh. She shivered. How could he possibly

know such things?

Yet, in all else, and in the relations of his daily life, he was sane

and reasonable, loving, kind and tender. It was only on the subject of

the trees he seemed unhinged and queer. Most curiously it seemed that,

since the collapse of the cedar they both loved, though in different

fashion, his departure from the normal had increased. Why else did he

watch them as a man might watch a sickly child? Why did he hunger

especially in the dusk to catch their "mood of night" as he called it?

Why think so carefully upon them when the frost was threatening or the

wind appeared to rise?

As she put it so frequently now herself--How could he possibly _know_

such things?

He went. As she closed the front door after him she heard the distant

roaring in the Forest.

And then it suddenly struck her: How could she know them too?

It dropped upon her like a blow that she felt at once all over, upon

body, heart and mind. The discovery rushed out from its ambush to

overwhelm. The truth of it, making all arguing futile, numbed her

faculties. But though at first it deadened her, she soon revived, and

her being rose into aggressive opposition. A wild yet calculated courage

like that which animates the leaders of splendid forlorn hopes flamed in

her little person--flamed grandly, and invincible. While knowing herself

insignificant and weak, she knew at the same time that power at her back

which moves the worlds. The faith that filled her was the weapon in her

hands, and the right by which she claimed it; but the spirit of utter,

selfless sacrifice that characterized her life was the means by which

she mastered its immediate use. For a kind of white and faultless

intuition guided her to the attack. Behind her stood her Bible and her

God.

How so magnificent a divination came to her at all may well be a matter

for astonishment, though some clue of explanation lies, perhaps, in the

very simpleness of her nature. At any rate, she saw quite clearly

certain things; saw them in moments only--after prayer, in the still

silence of the night, or when left alone those long hours in the house

with her knitting and her thoughts--and the guidance which then flashed

into her remained, even after the manner of its coming was forgotten.

They came to her, these things she saw, formless, wordless; she could

not put them into any kind of language; but by the very fact of being

uncaught in sentences they retained their original clear vigor.

Hours of patient waiting brought the first, and the others followed

easily afterwards, by degrees, on subsequent days, a little and a

little. Her husband had been gone since early morning, and had taken his

luncheon with him. She was sitting by the tea things, the cups and

teapot warmed, the muffins in the fender keeping hot, all ready for his

return, when she realized quite abruptly that this thing which took him

off, which kept him out so many hours day after day, this thing that was

against her own little will and instincts--was enormous as the sea. It

was no mere prettiness of single Trees, but something massed and

mountainous. About her rose the wall of its huge opposition to the sky,

its scale gigantic, its power utterly prodigious. What she knew of it

hitherto as green and delicate forms waving and rustling in the winds

was but, as it were the spray of foam that broke into sight upon the

nearer edge of viewless depths far, far away. The trees, indeed, were

sentinels set visibly about the limits of a camp that itself remained

invisible. The awful hum and murmur of the main body in the distance

passed into that still room about her with the firelight and hissing

kettle. Out yonder--in the Forest further out--the thing that was ever

roaring at the center was dreadfully increasing.

The sense of definite battle, too--battle between herself and the Forest

for his soul--came with it. Its presentiment was as clear as though

Thompson had come into the room and quietly told her that the cottage

was surrounded. "Please, ma'am, there are trees come up about the

house," she might have suddenly announced. And equally might have heard

her own answer: "It's all right, Thompson. The main body is still far

away."

Immediately upon its heels, then, came another truth, with a close

reality that shocked her. She saw that jealousy was not confined to the

human and animal world alone, but ran though all creation. The Vegetable

Kingdom knew it too. So-called inanimate nature shared it with the rest.

Trees felt it. This Forest just beyond the window--standing there in the

silence of the autumn evening across the little lawn--this Forest

understood it equally. The remorseless, branching power that sought to

keep exclusively for itself the thing it loved and needed, spread like a

running desire through all its million leaves and stems and roots. In

humans, of course, it was consciously directed; in animals it acted with

frank instinctiveness; but in trees this jealousy rose in some blind

tide of impersonal and unconscious wrath that would sweep opposition

from its path as the wind sweeps powdered snow from the surface of the

ice. Their number was a host with endless reinforcements, and once it

realized its passion was returned the power increased.... Her husband

loved the trees.... They had become aware of it.... They would take him

from her in the end....

Then, while she heard his footsteps in the hall and the closing of the

front door, she saw a third thing clearly;--realized the widening of the

gap between herself and him. This other love had made it. All these

weeks of the summer when she felt so close to him, now especially when

she had made the biggest sacrifice of her life to stay by his side and

help him, he had been slowly, surely--drawing away. The estrangement was

here and now--a fact accomplished. It had been all this time maturing;

there yawned this broad deep space between them. Across the empty

distance she saw the change in merciless perspective. It revealed his

face and figure, dearly-loved, once fondly worshipped, far on the other

side in shadowy distance, small, the back turned from her, and moving

while she watched--moving away from her.

They had their tea in silence then. She asked no questions, he

volunteered no information of his day. The heart was big within her, and

the terrible loneliness of age spread through her like a rising icy

mist. She watched him, filling all his wants. His hair was untidy and

his boots were caked with blackish mud. He moved with a restless,

swaying motion that somehow blanched her cheek and sent a miserable

shivering down her back. It reminded her of trees. His eyes were very

bright.

He brought in with him an odor of the earth and forest that seemed to

choke her and make it difficult to breathe; and--what she noticed with a

climax of almost uncontrollable alarm--upon his face beneath the

lamplight shone traces of a mild, faint glory that made her think of

moonlight falling upon a wood through speckled shadows. It was his

new-found happiness that shone there, a happiness uncaused by her and in

which she had no part.

In his coat was a spray of faded yellow beech leaves. "I brought this

from the Forest to you," he said, with all the air that belonged to his

little acts of devotion long ago. And she took the spray of leaves

mechanically with a smile and a murmured "thank you, dear," as though he

had unknowingly put into her hands the weapon for her own destruction

and she had accepted it.

And when the tea was over and he left the room, he did not go to his

study, or to change his clothes. She heard the front door softly shut

behind him as he again went out towards the Forest.

A moment later she was in her room upstairs, kneeling beside the

bed--the side she slept on--and praying wildly through a flood of tears

that God would save and keep him to her. Wind brushed the window panes

behind her while she knelt.

~VIII~

One sunny November morning, when the strain had reached a pitch that

made repression almost unmanageable, she came to an impulsive decision,

and obeyed it. Her husband had again gone out with luncheon for the day.

She took adventure in her hands and followed him. The power of

seeing-clear was strong upon her, forcing her up to some unnatural level

of understanding. To stay indoors and wait inactive for his return

seemed suddenly impossible. She meant to know what he knew, feel what he

felt, put herself in his place. She would dare the fascination of the

Forest--share it with him. It was greatly daring; but it would give her

greater understanding how to help and save him and therefore greater

Power. She went upstairs a moment first to pray.

In a thick, warm skirt, and wearing heavy boots--those walking boots she

used with him upon the mountains about Seillans--she left the cottage by

the back way and turned towards the Forest. She could not actually

follow him, for he had started off an hour before and she knew not

exactly his direction. What was so urgent in her was the wish to be with

him in the woods, to walk beneath leafless branches just as he did: to

be there when he was there, even though not together. For it had come to

her that she might thus share with him for once this horrible mighty

life and breathing of the trees he loved. In winter, he had said, they

needed him particularly, and winter now was coming. Her love must bring

her something of what he felt himself--the huge attraction, the suction

and the pull of all the trees. Thus, in some vicarious fashion, she

might share, though unknown to himself, this very thing that was taking

him away from her. She might thus even lessen its attack upon himself.

The impulse came to her clairvoyantly, and she obeyed without a sign of

hesitation. Deeper comprehension would come to her of the whole awful

puzzle. And come it did, yet not in the way she imagined and expected.

The air was very still, the sky a cold pale blue, but cloudless. The

entire Forest stood silent, at attention. It knew perfectly well that

she had come. It knew the moment when she entered; watched and followed

her; and behind her something dropped without a sound and shut her in.

Her feet upon the glades of mossy grass fell silently, as the oaks and

beeches shifted past in rows and took up their positions at her back. It

was not pleasant, this way they grew so dense behind her the instant she

had passed. She realized that they gathered in an ever-growing army,

massed, herded, trooped, between her and the cottage, shutting off

escape. They let her pass so easily, but to get out again she would know

them differently--thick, crowded, branches all drawn and hostile.

Already their increasing numbers bewildered her. In front, they looked

so sparse and scattered, with open spaces where the sunshine fell; but

when she turned it seemed they stood so close together, a serried army,

darkening the sunlight. They blocked the day, collected all the shadows,

stood with their leafless and forbidding rampart like the night. They

swallowed down into themselves the very glade by which she came. For

when she glanced behind her--rarely--the way she had come was shadowy

and lost.

Yet the morning sparkled overhead, and a glance of excitement ran

quivering through the entire day. It was what she always knew as

"children's weather," so clear and harmless, without a sign of danger,

nothing ominous to threaten or alarm. Steadfast in her purpose, looking

back as little as she dared, Sophia Bittacy marched slowly and

deliberately into the heart of the silent woods, deeper, ever deeper.

And then, abruptly, in an open space where the sunshine fell unhindered,

she stopped. It was one of the breathing places of the forest. Dead,

withered bracken lay in patches of unsightly grey. There were bits of

heather too. All round the trees stood looking on--oak, beech, holly,

ash, pine, larch, with here and there small groups of juniper. On the

lips of this breathing space of the woods she stopped to rest,

disobeying her instinct for the first time. For the other instinct in

her was to go on. She did not really want to rest.

This was the little act that brought it to her--the wireless message

from a vast Emitter.

"I've been stopped," she thought to herself with a horrid qualm.

She looked about her in this quiet, ancient place. Nothing stirred.

There was no life nor sign of life; no birds sang; no rabbits scuttled

off at her approach. The stillness was bewildering, and gravity hung

down upon it like a heavy curtain. It hushed the heart in her. Could

this be part of what her husband felt--this sense of thick entanglement

with stems, boughs, roots, and foliage?

"This has always been as it is now," she thought, yet not knowing why

she thought it. "Ever since the Forest grew it has been still and secret

here. It has never changed." The curtain of silence drew closer while

she said it, thickening round her. "For a thousand years--I'm here with

a thousand years. And behind this place stand all the forests of the

world!"

So foreign to her temperament were such thoughts, and so alien to all

she had been taught to look for in Nature, that she strove against them.

She made an effort to oppose. But they clung and haunted just the same;

they refused to be dispersed. The curtain hung dense and heavy as though

its texture thickened. The air with difficulty came through.

And then she thought that curtain stirred. There was movement somewhere.

That obscure dim thing which ever broods behind the visible appearances

of trees came nearer to her. She caught her breath and stared about her,

listening intently. The trees, perhaps because she saw them more in

detail now, it seemed to her had changed. A vague, faint alteration

spread over them, at first so slight she scarcely would admit it, then

growing steadily, though still obscurely, outwards. "They tremble and

are changed," flashed through her mind the horrid line that Sanderson

had quoted. Yet the change was graceful for all the uncouthness

attendant upon the size of so vast a movement. They had turned in her

direction. That was it. _They saw her._ In this way the change

expressed itself in her groping, terrified thought. Till now it had been

otherwise: she had looked at them from her own point of view; now they

looked at her from theirs. They stared her in the face and eyes; they

stared at her all over. In some unkind, resentful, hostile way, they

watched her. Hitherto in life she had watched them variously, in

superficial ways, reading into them what her own mind suggested. Now

they read into her the things they actually _were_, and not merely

another's interpretations of them.

They seemed in their motionless silence there instinct with life, a

life, moreover, that breathed about her a species of terrible soft

enchantment that bewitched. It branched all through her, climbing to the

brain. The Forest held her with its huge and giant fascination. In this

secluded breathing spot that the centuries had left untouched, she had

stepped close against the hidden pulse of the whole collective mass of

them. They were aware of her and had turned to gaze with their myriad,

vast sight upon the intruder. They shouted at her in the silence. For

she wanted to look back at them, but it was like staring at a crowd, and

her glance merely shifted from one tree to another, hurriedly, finding

in none the one she sought. They saw her so easily, each and all. The

rows that stood behind her also stared. But she could not return the

gaze. Her husband, she realized, could. And their steady stare shocked

her as though in some sense she knew that she was naked. They saw so

much of her: she saw of them--so little.

Her efforts to return their gaze were pitiful. The constant shifting

increased her bewilderment. Conscious of this awful and enormous sight

all over her, she let her eyes first rest upon the ground, and then she

closed them altogether. She kept the lids as tight together as ever they

would go.

But the sight of the trees came even into that inner darkness behind the

fastened lids, for there was no escaping it. Outside, in the light, she

still knew that the leaves of the hollies glittered smoothly, that the

dead foliage of the oaks hung crisp in the air about her, that the

needles of the little junipers were pointing all one way. The spread

perception of the Forest was focused on herself, and no mere shutting of

the eyes could hide its scattered yet concentrated stare--the

all-inclusive vision of great woods.

There was no wind, yet here and there a single leaf hanging by its

dried-up stalk shook all alone with great rapidity--rattling. It was the

sentry drawing attention to her presence. And then, again, as once long

weeks before, she felt their Being as a tide about her. The tide had

turned. That memory of her childhood sands came back, when the nurse

said, "The tide has turned now; we must go in," and she saw the mass of

piled-up waters, green and heaped to the horizon, and realized that it

was slowly coming in. The gigantic mass of it, too vast for hurry,

loaded with massive purpose, she used to feel, was moving towards

herself. The fluid body of the sea was creeping along beneath the sky to

the very spot upon the yellow sands where she stood and played. The

sight and thought of it had always overwhelmed her with a sense of

awe--as though her puny self were the object of the whole sea's advance.

"The tide has turned; we had better now go in."

This was happening now about her--the same thing was happening in the

woods--slow, sure, and steady, and its motion as little discernible as

the sea's. The tide had turned. The small human presence that had

ventured among its green and mountainous depths, moreover, was its

objective.

That all was clear within her while she sat and waited with tight-shut

lids. But the next moment she opened her eyes with a sudden realization

of something more. The presence that it sought was after all not hers.

It was the presence of some one other than herself. And then she

understood. Her eyes had opened with a click, it seemed, but the sound,

in reality, was outside herself.

Across the clearing where the sunshine lay so calm and still, she saw

the figure of her husband moving among the trees--a man, like a tree,

walking.

With hands behind his back, and head uplifted, he moved quite slowly, as

though absorbed in his own thoughts. Hardly fifty paces separated them,

but he had no inkling of her presence there so near. With mind intent

and senses all turned inwards, he marched past her like a figure in a

dream, and like a figure in a dream she saw him go. Love, yearning, pity

rose in a storm within her, but as in nightmare she found no words or

movement possible. She sat and watched him go--go from her--go into the

deeper reaches of the green enveloping woods. Desire to save, to bid him

stop and turn, ran in a passion through her being, but there was nothing

she could do. She saw him go away from her, go of his own accord and

willingly beyond her; she saw the branches drop about his steps and hid

him. His figure faded out among the speckled shade and sunlight. The

trees covered him. The tide just took him, all unresisting and content

to go. Upon the bosom of the green soft sea he floated away beyond her

reach of vision. Her eyes could follow him no longer. He was gone.

And then for the first time she realized, even at that distance, that

the look upon his face was one of peace and happiness--rapt, and caught

away in joy, a look of youth. That expression now he never showed to

her. But she _had_ known it. Years ago, in the early days of their

married life, she had seen it on his face. Now it no longer obeyed the

summons of her presence and her love. The woods alone could call it

forth; it answered to the trees; the Forest had taken every part of

him--from her--his very heart and soul.

Her sight that had plunged inwards to the fields of faded memory now

came back to outer things again. She looked about her, and her love,

returning empty-handed and unsatisfied, left her open to the invading of

the bleakest terror she had ever known. That such things could be real

and happen found her helpless utterly. Terror invaded the quietest

corners of her heart, that had never yet known quailing. She could

not--for moments at any rate--reach either her Bible or her God.

Desolate in an empty world of fear she sat with eyes too dry and hot for

tears, yet with a coldness as of ice upon her very flesh. She stared,

unseeing, about her. That horror which stalks in the stillness of the

noonday, when the glare of an artificial sunshine lights up the

motionless trees, moved all about her. In front and behind she was aware

of it. Beyond this stealthy silence, just within the edge of it, the

things of another world were passing. But she could not know them. Her

husband knew them, knew their beauty and their awe, yes, but for her

they were out of reach. She might not share with him the very least of

them. It seemed that behind and through the glare of this wintry noonday

in the heart of the woods there brooded another universe of life and

passion, for her all unexpressed. The silence veiled it, the stillness

hid it; but he moved with it all and understood. His love interpreted

it.

She rose to her feet, tottered feebly, and collapsed again upon the

moss. Yet for herself she felt no terror; no little personal fear could

touch her whose anguish and deep longing streamed all out to him whom

she so bravely loved. In this time of utter self-forgetfulness, when she

realized that the battle was hopeless, thinking she had lost even her

God, she found Him again quite close beside her like a little Presence

in this terrible heart of the hostile Forest. But at first she did not

recognize that He was there; she did not know Him in that strangely

unacceptable guise. For He stood so very close, so very intimate, so

very sweet and comforting, and yet so hard to understand--as

Resignation.

Once more she struggled to her feet, and this time turned successfully

and slowly made her way along the mossy glade by which she came. And at

first she marveled, though only for a moment, at the ease with which she

found the path. For a moment only, because almost at once she saw the

truth. The trees were glad that she should go. They helped her on her

way. The Forest did not want her.

The tide was coming in, indeed, yet not for her.

And so, in another of those flashes of clear-vision that of late had

lifted life above the normal level, she saw and understood the whole

terrible thing complete.

Till now, though unexpressed in thought or language, her fear had been

that the woods her husband loved would somehow take him from her--to

merge his life in theirs--even to kill him on some mysterious way. This

time she saw her deep mistake, and so seeing, let in upon herself the

fuller agony of horror. For their jealousy was not the petty jealousy of

animals or humans. They wanted him because they loved him, but they did

_ not_ want him dead. Full charged with his splendid life and enthusiasm

they wanted him. They wanted him--alive.

It was she who stood in their way, and it was she whom they intended to

remove.

This was what brought the sense of abject helplessness. She stood upon

the sands against an entire ocean slowly rolling in against her. For, as

all the forces of a human being combine unconsciously to eject a grain

of sand that has crept beneath the skin to cause discomfort, so the

entire mass of what Sanderson had called the Collective Consciousness of

the Forest strove to eject this human atom that stood across the path of

its desire. Loving her husband, she had crept beneath its skin. It was

her they would eject and take away; it was her they would destroy, not

him. Him, whom they loved and needed, they would keep alive. They meant

to take him living. She reached the house in safety, though she never

remembered how she found her way. It was made all simple for her. The

branches almost urged her out.

But behind her, as she left the shadowed precincts, she felt as though

some towering Angel of the Woods let fall across the threshold the

flaming sword of a countless multitude of leaves that formed behind her

a barrier, green, shimmering, and impassable. Into the Forest she never

walked again.

And she went about her daily duties with a calm and quietness that was a

perpetual astonishment even to herself, for it hardly seemed of this

world at all. She talked to her husband when he came in for tea--after

dark. Resignation brings a curious large courage--when there is nothing

more to lose. The soul takes risks, and dares. Is it a curious short-cut

sometimes to the heights?

"David, I went into the Forest, too, this morning, soon after you I

went. I saw you there."

"Wasn't it wonderful?" he answered simply, inclining his head a little.

There was no surprise or annoyance in his look; a mild and gentle

_ennui_ rather. He asked no real question. She thought of some garden

tree the wind attacks too suddenly, bending it over when it does not

want to bend--the mild unwillingness with which it yields. She often saw

him this way now, in the terms of trees.

"It was very wonderful indeed, dear, yes," she replied low, her voice

not faltering though indistinct. "But for me it was too--too strange and

big."

The passion of tears lay just below the quiet voice all unbetrayed.

Somehow she kept them back.

There was a pause, and then he added:

"I find it more and more so every day." His voice passed through the

lamp-lit room like a murmur of the wind in branches. The look of youth

and happiness she had caught upon his face out there had wholly gone,

and an expression of weariness was in its place, as of a man distressed

vaguely at finding himself in uncongenial surroundings where he is

slightly ill at ease. It was the house he hated--coming back to rooms

and walls and furniture. The ceilings and closed windows confined him.

Yet, in it, no suggestion that he found _her_ irksome. Her presence

seemed of no account at all; indeed, he hardly noticed her. For whole

long periods he lost her, did not know that she was there. He had no

need of her. He lived alone. Each lived alone.

The outward signs by which she recognized that the awful battle was

against her and the terms of surrender accepted were pathetic. She put

the medicine-chest away upon the shelf; she gave the orders for his

pocket-luncheon before he asked; she went to bed alone and early,

leaving the front door unlocked, with milk and bread and butter in the

hall beside the lamp--all concessions that she felt impelled to make.

Fore more and more, unless the weather was too violent, he went out

after dinner even, staying for hours in the woods. But she never slept

until she heard the front door close below, and knew soon afterwards his

careful step come creeping up the stairs and into the room so softly.

Until she heard his regular deep breathing close beside her, she lay

awake. All strength or desire to resist had gone for good. The thing

against her was too huge and powerful. Capitulation was complete, a fact

accomplished. She dated it from the day she followed him to the Forest.

Moreover, the time for evacuation--her own evacuation--seemed

approaching. It came stealthily ever nearer, surely and slowly as the

rising tide she used to dread. At the high-water mark she stood waiting

calmly--waiting to be swept away. Across the lawn all those terrible

days of early winter the encircling Forest watched it come, guiding its

silent swell and currents towards her feet. Only she never once gave up

her Bible or her praying. This complete resignation, moreover, had

somehow brought to her a strange great understanding, and if she could

not share her husband's horrible abandonment to powers outside himself,

she could, and did, in some half-groping way grasp at shadowy meanings

that might make such abandonment--possible, yes, but more than merely

possible--in some extraordinary sense not evil.

Hitherto she had divided the beyond-world into two sharp halves--spirits

good or spirits evil. But thoughts came to her now, on soft and very

tentative feet, like the footsteps of the gods which are on wool, that

besides these definite classes, there might be other Powers as well,

belonging definitely to neither one nor other. Her thought stopped dead

at that. But the big idea found lodgment in her little mind, and, owing

to the largeness of her heart, remained there unejected. It even brought

a certain solace with it.

The failure--or unwillingness, as she preferred to state it--of her God

to interfere and help, that also she came in a measure to understand.

For here, she found it more and more possible to imagine, was perhaps no

positive evil at work, but only something that usually stands away from

humankind, something alien and not commonly recognized. There _was_ a

gulf fixed between the two, and Mr. Sanderson _had_ bridged it, by his

talk, his explanations, his attitude of mind. Through these her husband

had found the way into it. His temperament and natural passion for the

woods had prepared the soul in him, and the moment he saw the way to go

he took it--the line of least resistance. Life was, of course, open to

all, and her husband had the right to choose it where he would. He had

chosen it--away from her, away from other men, but not necessarily away

from God. This was an enormous concession that she skirted, never really

faced; it was too revolutionary to face. But its possibility peeped into

her bewildered mind. It might delay his progress, or it might advance

it. Who could know? And why should God, who ordered all things with such

magnificent detail, from the pathway of a sun to the falling of a

sparrow, object to his free choice, or interfere to hinder him and stop?

She came to realize resignation, that is, in another aspect. It gave her

comfort, if not peace. She fought against all belittling of her God. It

was, perhaps, enough that He--knew.

"You are not alone, dear in the trees out there?" she ventured one

night, as he crept on tiptoe into the room not far from midnight. "God

is with you?"

"Magnificently," was the immediate answer, given with enthusiasm, "for

He is everywhere. And I only wish that you--"

But she stuffed the clothes against her ears. That invitation on his

lips was more than she could bear to hear. It seemed like asking her to

hurry to her own execution. She buried her face among the sheets and

blankets, shaking all over like a leaf.

~IX~

And so the thought that she was the one to go remained and grew. It was,

perhaps, first sign of that weakening of the mind which indicated the

singular manner of her going. For it was her mental opposition, the

trees felt, that stood in their way. Once that was overcome,

obliterated, her physical presence did not matter. She would be

harmless.

Having accepted defeat, because she had come to feel that his obsession

was not actually evil, she accepted at the same time the conditions of

an atrocious loneliness. She stood now from her husband farther than

from the moon. They had no visitors. Callers were few and far between,

and less encouraged than before. The empty dark of winter was before

them. Among the neighbors was none in whom, without disloyalty to her

husband, she could confide. Mr. Mortimer, had he been single, might have

helped her in this desert of solitude that preyed upon her mind, but his

wife was there the obstacle; for Mrs. Mortimer wore sandals, believed

that nuts were the complete food of man, and indulged in other

idiosyncrasies that classed her inevitably among the "latter signs"

which Mrs. Bittacy had been taught to dread as dangerous. She stood most

desolately alone.

Solitude, therefore, in which the mind unhindered feeds upon its own

delusions, was the assignable cause of her gradual mental disruption and

collapse.

With the definite arrival of the colder weather her husband gave up his

rambles after dark; evenings were spent together over the fire; he read

The Times; they even talked about their postponed visit abroad in the

coming spring. No restlessness was on him at the change; he seemed

content and easy in his mind; spoke little of the trees and woods;

enjoyed far better health than if there had been change of scene, and to

herself was tender, kind, solicitous over trifles, as in the distant

days of their first honeymoon.

But this deep calm could not deceive her; it meant, she fully

understood, that he felt sure of himself, sure of her, and sure of the

trees as well. It all lay buried in the depths of him, too secure and

deep, too intimately established in his central being to permit of those

surface fluctuations which betray disharmony within. His life was hid

with trees. Even the fever, so dreaded in the damp of winter, left him

free. She now knew why: the fever was due to their efforts to obtain

him, his efforts to respond and go--physical results of a fierce unrest

he had never understood till Sanderson came with his wicked

explanations. Now it was otherwise. The bridge was made. And--he had

gone.

And she, brave, loyal, and consistent soul, found herself utterly alone,

even trying to make his passage easy. It seemed that she stood at the

bottom of some huge ravine that opened in her mind, the walls whereof

instead of rock were trees that reached enormous to the sky, engulfing

her. God alone knew that she was there. He watched, permitted, even

perhaps approved. At any rate--He knew.

During those quiet evenings in the house, moreover, while they sat over

the fire listening to the roaming winds about the house, her husband

knew continual access to the world his alien love had furnished for him.

Never for a single instant was he cut off from it. She gazed at the

newspaper spread before his face and knees, saw the smoke of his cheroot

curl up above the edge, noticed the little hole in his evening socks,

and listened to the paragraphs he read aloud as of old. But this was all

a veil he spread about himself of purpose. Behind it--he escaped. It was

the conjurer's trick to divert the sight to unimportant details while

the essential thing went forward unobserved. He managed wonderfully; she

loved him for the pains he took to spare her distress; but all the while

she knew that the body lolling in that armchair before her eyes

contained the merest fragment of his actual self. It was little better

than a corpse. It was an empty shell. The essential soul of him was out

yonder with the Forest--farther out near that ever-roaring heart of it.

And, with the dark, the Forest came up boldly and pressed against the

very walls and windows, peering in upon them, joining hands above the

slates and chimneys. The winds were always walking on the lawn and

gravel paths; steps came and went and came again; some one seemed always

talking in the woods, some one was in the building too. She passed them

on the stairs, or running soft and muffled, very large and gentle, down

the passages and landings after dusk, as though loose fragments of the

Day had broken off and stayed there caught among the shadows, trying to

get out. They blundered silently all about the house. They waited till

she passed, then made a run for it. And her husband always knew. She saw

him more than once deliberately avoid them--because _she_ was there.

More than once, too, she saw him stand and listen when he thought she

was not near, then heard herself the long bounding stride of their

approach across the silent garden. Already _he_ had heard them in the

windy distance of the night, far, far away. They sped, she well knew,

along that glade of mossy turf by which she last came out; it cushioned

their tread exactly as it had cushioned her own.

It seemed to her the trees were always in the house with him, and in

their very bedroom. He welcomed them, unaware that she also knew, and

trembled.

One night in their bedroom it caught her unawares. She woke out of deep

sleep and it came upon her before she could gather her forces for

control.

The day had been wildly boisterous, but now the wind had dropped, only

its rags went fluttering through the night. The rays of the full moon

fell in a shower between the branches. Overhead still raced the scud and

wrack, shaped like hurrying monsters; but below the earth was quiet.

Still and dripping stood the hosts of trees. Their trunks gleamed wet

and sparkling where the moon caught them. There was a strong smell of

mould and fallen leaves. The air was sharp--heavy with odor.

And she knew all this the instant that she woke; for it seemed to her

that she had been elsewhere--following her husband--as though she had

been _out_! There was no dream at all, merely the definite, haunting

certainty. It dived away, lost, buried in the night. She sat upright in

bed. She had come back.

The room shone pale in the moonlight reflected through the windows, for

the blinds were up, and she saw her husband's form beside her,

motionless in deep sleep. But what caught her unawares was the horrid

thing that by this fact of sudden, unexpected waking she had surprised

these other things in the room, beside the very bed, gathered close

about him while he slept. It was their dreadful boldness--herself of no

account as it were--that terrified her into screaming before she could

collect her powers to prevent. She screamed before she realized what she

did--a long, high shriek of terror that filled the room, yet made so

little actual sound. For wet and shimmering presences stood grouped all

round that bed. She saw their outline underneath the ceiling, the green,

spread bulk of them, their vague extension over walls and furniture.

They shifted to and fro, massed yet translucent, mild yet thick, moving

and turning within themselves to a hushed noise of multitudinous soft

rustling. In their sound was something very sweet and sinning that fell

into her with a spell of horrible enchantment. They were so mild, each

one alone, yet so terrific in their combination. Cold seized her. The

sheets against her body had turned to ice.

She screamed a second time, though the sound hardly issued from her

throat. The spell sank deeper, reaching to the heart; for it softened

all the currents of her blood and took life from her in a

stream--towards themselves. Resistance in that moment seemed impossible.

Her husband then stirred in his sleep, and woke. And, instantly, the

forms drew up, erect, and gathered themselves in some amazing way

together. They lessened in extent--then scattered through the air like

an effect of light when shadows seek to smother it. It was tremendous,

yet most exquisite. A sheet of pale-green shadow that yet had form and

substance filled the room. There was a rush of silent movement, as the

Presences drew past her through the air,--and they were gone.

But, clearest of all, she saw the manner of their going; for she

recognized in their tumult of escape by the window open at the top, the

same wide "looping circles"--spirals as it seemed--that she had seen

upon the lawn those weeks ago when Sanderson had talked. The room once

more was empty.

In the collapse that followed, she heard her husband's voice, as though

coming from some great distance. Her own replies she heard as well. Both

were so strange and unlike their normal speech, the very words

unnatural.

"What is it, dear? Why do you wake me _now_ ?" And his voice whispered

it with a sighing sound, like wind in pine boughs.

"A moment since something went past me through the air of the room. Back

to the night outside it went." Her voice, too, held the same note as of

wind entangled among too many leaves.

"My dear, it _was_ the wind."

"But it called, David. It was calling _you_--by name!"

"The air of the branches, dear, was what you heard. Now, sleep again, I

beg you, sleep."

"It had a crowd of eyes all through and over it--before and behind--"

Her voice grew louder. But his own in reply sank lower, far away, and

oddly hushed.

"The moonlight, dear, upon the sea of twigs and boughs in the rain, was

what you saw."

"But it frightened me. I've lost my God--and you--I'm cold as death!"

"My dear, it is the cold of the early morning hours. The whole world

sleeps. Now sleep again yourself."

He whispered close to her ear. She felt his hand stroking her. His voice

was soft and very soothing. But only a part of him was there; only a

part of him was speaking; it was a half-emptied body that lay beside her

and uttered these strange sentences, even forcing her own singular

choice of words. The horrible, dim enchantment of the trees was close

about them in the room--gnarled, ancient, lonely trees of winter,

whispering round the human life they loved.

"And let me sleep again," she heard him murmur as he settled down among

the clothes, "sleep back into that deep, delicious peace from which you

called me."

His dreamy, happy tone, and that look of youth and joy she discerned

upon his features even in the filtered moonlight, touched her again as

with the spell of those shining, mild green presences. It sank down into

her. She felt sleep grope for her. On the threshold of slumber one of

those strange vagrant voices that loss of consciousness lets loose cried

faintly in her heart--

"There is joy in the Forest over one sinner that--"

Then sleep took her before she had time to realize even that she was

vilely parodying one of her most precious texts, and that the

irreverence was ghastly.

And though she quickly slept again, her sleep was not as usual,

dreamless. It was not woods and trees she dreamed of, but a small and

curious dream that kept coming again and again upon her; that she stood

upon a wee, bare rock I the sea, and that the tide was rising. The water

first came to her feet, then to her knees, then to her waist. Each time

the dream returned, the tide seemed higher. Once it rose to her neck,

once even to her mouth, covering her lips for a moment so that she could

not breathe. She did not wake between the dreams; a period of drab and

dreamless slumber intervened. But, finally, the water rose above her

eyes and face, completely covering her head.

And then came explanation--the sort of explanation dreams bring. She

understood. For, beneath the water, she had seen the world of seaweed

rising from the bottom of the sea like a forest of dense green-long,

sinuous stems, immense thick branches, millions of feelers spreading

through the darkened watery depths the power of their ocean foliage. The

Vegetable Kingdom was even in the sea. It was everywhere. Earth, air,

and water helped it, way of escape there was none.

And even underneath the sea she heard that terrible sound of

roaring--was it surf or wind or voices?--further out, yet coming

steadily towards her.

And so, in the loneliness of that drab English winter, the mind of Mrs.

Bittacy, preying upon itself, and fed by constant dread, went lost in

disproportion. Dreariness filled the weeks with dismal, sunless skies

and a clinging moisture that knew no wholesome tonic of keen frosts.

Alone with her thoughts, both her husband and her God withdrawn into

distance, she counted the days to Spring. She groped her way, stumbling

down the long dark tunnel. Through the arch at the far end lay a

brilliant picture of the violet sea sparkling on the coast of France.

There lay safety and escape for both of them, could she but hold on.

Behind her the trees blocked up the other entrance. She never once

looked back.

She drooped. Vitality passed from her, drawn out and away as by some

steady suction. Immense and incessant was this sensation of her powers

draining off. The taps were all turned on. Her personality, as it were,

streamed steadily away, coaxed outwards by this Power that never wearied

and seemed inexhaustible. It won her as the full moon wins the tide. She

waned; she faded; she obeyed.

At first she watched the process, and recognized exactly what was going

on. Her physical life, and that balance of mind which depends on

physical well-being, were being slowly undermined. She saw that clearly.

Only the soul, dwelling like a star apart from these and independent of

them, lay safe somewhere--with her distant God. That she

knew--tranquilly. The spiritual love that linked her to her husband was

safe from all attack. Later, in His good time, they would merge together

again because of it. But meanwhile, all of her that had kinship with the

earth was slowly going. This separation was being remorselessly

accomplished. Every part of her the trees could touch was being steadily

drained from her. She was being--removed.

After a time, however, even this power of realization went, so that she

no longer "watched the process" or knew exactly what was going on. The

one satisfaction she had known--the feeling that it was sweet to suffer

for his sake--went with it. She stood utterly alone with this terror of

the trees ... mid the ruins of her broken and disordered mind.

She slept badly; woke in the morning with hot and tired eyes; her head

ached dully; she grew confused in thought and lost the clues of daily

life in the most feeble fashion. At the same time she lost sight, too,

of that brilliant picture at the exist of the tunnel; it faded away into

a tiny semicircle of pale light, the violet sea and the sunshine the

merest point of white, remote as a star and equally inaccessible. She

knew now that she could never reach it. And through the darkness that

stretched behind, the power of the trees came close and caught her,

twining about her feet and arms, climbing to her very lips. She woke at

night, finding it difficult to breathe. There seemed wet leaves pressing

against her mouth, and soft green tendrils clinging to her neck. Her

feet were heavy, half rooted, as it were, in deep, thick earth. Huge

creepers stretched along the whole of that black tunnel, feeling about

her person for points where they might fasten well, as ivy or the giant

parasites of the Vegetable Kingdom settle down on the trees themselves

to sap their life and kill them.

Slowly and surely the morbid growth possessed her life and held her. She

feared those very winds that ran about the wintry forest. They were in

league with it. They helped it everywhere.

"Why don't you sleep, dear?" It was her husband now who played the rôle

of nurse, tending her little wants with an honest care that at least

aped the services of love. He was so utterly unconscious of the raging

battle he had caused. "What is it keeps you so wide awake and restless?"

"The winds," she whispered in the dark. For hours she had been watching

the tossing of the trees through the blindless windows. "They go walking

and talking everywhere to-night, keeping me awake. And all the time they

call so loudly to you."

And his strange whispered answer appalled her for a moment until the

meaning of it faded and left her in a dark confusion of the mind that

was now becoming almost permanent.

"The trees excite them in the night. The winds are the great swift

carriers. Go with them, dear--and not against. You'll find sleep that

way if you do."

"The storm is rising," she began, hardly knowing what she said.

"All the more then--go with them. Don't resist. They'll take you to the

trees, that's all."

Resist! The word touched on the button of some text that once had helped

her.

"Resist the devil and he will flee from you," she heard her whispered

answer, and the same second had buried her face beneath the clothes in a

flood of hysterical weeping.

But her husband did not seem disturbed. Perhaps he did not hear it, for

the wind ran just then against the windows with a booming shout, and the

roaring of the Forest farther out came behind the blow, surging into the

room. Perhaps, too, he was already asleep again. She slowly regained a

sort of dull composure. Her face emerged from the tangle of sheets and

blankets. With a growing terror over her--she listened. The storm was

rising. It came with a sudden and impetuous rush that made all further

sleep for her impossible.

Alone in a shaking world, it seemed, she lay and listened. That storm

interpreted for her mind the climax. The Forest bellowed out its victory

to the winds; the winds in turn proclaimed it to the Night. The whole

world knew of her complete defeat, her loss, her little human pain. This

was the roar and shout of victory that she listened to.

For, unmistakably, the trees were shouting in the dark. These were

sounds, too, like the flapping of great sails, a thousand at a time, and

sometimes reports that resembled more than anything else the distant

booming of enormous drums. The trees stood up--the whole beleaguering

host of them stood up--and with the uproar of their million branches

drummed the thundering message out across the night. It seemed as if

they had all broken loose. Their roots swept trailing over field and

hedge and roof. They tossed their bushy heads beneath the clouds with a

wild, delighted shuffling of great boughs. With trunks upright they

raced leaping through the sky. There was upheaval and adventure in the

awful sound they made, and their cry was like the cry of a sea that has

broken through its gates and poured loose upon the world....

Through it all her husband slept peacefully as though he heard it not.

It was, as she well knew, the sleep of the semi-dead. For he was out

with all that clamoring turmoil. The part of him that she had lost was

there. The form that slept so calmly at her side was but the shell, half

emptied.

And when the winter's morning stole upon the scene at length, with a

pale, washed sunshine that followed the departing tempest, the first

thing she saw, as she crept to the window and looked out, was the ruined

cedar lying on the lawn. Only the gaunt and crippled trunk of it

remained. The single giant bough that had been left to it lay dark upon

the grass, sucked endways towards the Forest by a great wind eddy. It

lay there like a mass of drift-wood from a wreck, left by the ebbing of

a high spring-tide upon the sands--remnant of some friendly, splendid

vessel that once sheltered men.

And in the distance she heard the roaring of the Forest further out. Her

husband's voice was in it.