I.

There was a glow in the sky as if great furnace doors were opened.

But all the afternoon his eyes had looked on glamour; he had strayed in

fairyland. The holidays were nearly done, and Lucian Taylor had gone

out resolved to lose himself, to discover strange hills and prospects

that he had never seen before. The air was still, breathless, exhausted

after heavy rain, and the clouds looked as if they had been moulded of

lead. No breeze blew upon the hill, and down in the well of the valley

not a dry leaf stirred, not a bough shook in all the dark January

woods.

About a mile from the rectory he had diverged from the main road by an

opening that promised mystery and adventure. It was an old neglected

lane, little more than a ditch, worn ten feet deep by its winter

waters, and shadowed by great untrimmed hedges, densely woven together.

On each side were turbid streams, and here and there a torrent of water

gushed down the banks, flooding the lane. It was so deep and dark that

he could not get a glimpse of the country through which he was passing,

but the way went down and down to some unconjectured hollow.

Perhaps he walked two miles between the high walls of the lane before

its descent ceased, but he thrilled with the sense of having journeyed

very far, all the long way from the known to the unknown. He had come

as it were into the bottom of a bowl amongst the hills, and black woods

shut out the world. From the road behind him, from the road before him,

from the unseen wells beneath the trees, rivulets of waters swelled and

streamed down towards the center to the brook that crossed the lane.

Amid the dead and wearied silence of the air, beneath leaden and

motionless clouds, it was strange to hear such a tumult of gurgling and

rushing water, and he stood for a while on the quivering footbridge and

watched the rush of dead wood and torn branches and wisps of straw, all

hurrying madly past him, to plunge into the heaped spume, the barmy

froth that had gathered against a fallen tree.

Then he climbed again, and went up between limestone rocks, higher and

higher, till the noise of waters became indistinct, a faint humming of

swarming hives in summer. He walked some distance on level ground, till

there was a break in the banks and a stile on which he could lean and

look out. He found himself, as he had hoped, afar and forlorn; he had

strayed into outland and occult territory. From the eminence of the

lane, skirting the brow of a hill, he looked down into deep valleys and

dingles, and beyond, across the trees, to remoter country, wild bare

hills and dark wooded lands meeting the grey still sky. Immediately

beneath his feet the ground sloped steep down to the valley, a hillside

of close grass patched with dead bracken, and dotted here and there

with stunted thorns, and below there were deep oak woods, all still and

silent, and lonely as if no one ever passed that way. The grass and

bracken and thorns and woods, all were brown and grey beneath the

leaden sky, and as Lucian looked he was amazed, as though he were

reading a wonderful story, the meaning of which was a little greater

than his understanding. Then, like the hero of a fairy-book, he went on

and on, catching now and again glimpses of the amazing country into

which he had penetrated, and perceiving rather than seeing that as the

day waned everything grew more grey and somber. As he advanced he heard

the evening sounds of the farms, the low of the cattle, and the barking

of the sheepdogs; a faint thin noise from far away. It was growing

late, and as the shadows blackened he walked faster, till once more the

lane began to descend, there was a sharp turn, and he found himself,

with a good deal of relief, and a little disappointment, on familiar

ground. He had nearly described a circle, and knew this end of the lane

very well; it was not much more than a mile from home. He walked

smartly down the hill; the air was all glimmering and indistinct,

transmuting trees and hedges into ghostly shapes, and the walls of the

White House Farm flickered on the hillside, as if they were moving

towards him. Then a change came. First, a little breath of wind brushed

with a dry whispering sound through the hedges, the few leaves left on

the boughs began to stir, and one or two danced madly, and as the wind

freshened and came up from a new quarter, the sapless branches above

rattled against one another like bones. The growing breeze seemed to

clear the air and lighten it. He was passing the stile where a path led

to old Mrs. Gibbon’s desolate little cottage, in the middle of the

fields, at some distance even from the lane, and he saw the light blue

smoke of her chimney rise distinct above the gaunt greengage trees,

against a pale band that was broadening along the horizon. As he passed

the stile with his head bent, and his eyes on the ground, something

white started out from the black shadow of the hedge, and in the

strange twilight, now tinged with a flush from the west, a figure

seemed to swim past him and disappear. For a moment he wondered who it

could be, the light was so flickering and unsteady, so unlike the real

atmosphere of the day, when he recollected it was only Annie Morgan,

old Morgan’s daughter at the White House. She was three years older

than he, and it annoyed him to find that though she was only fifteen,

there had been a dreadful increase in her height since the summer

holidays. He had got to the bottom of the hill, and, lifting up his

eyes, saw the strange changes of the sky. The pale band had broadened

into a clear vast space of light, and above, the heavy leaden clouds

were breaking apart and driving across the heaven before the wind. He

stopped to watch, and looked up at the great mound that jutted out from

the hills into mid-valley. It was a natural formation, and always it

must have had something of the form of a fort, but its steepness had

been increased by Roman art, and there were high banks on the summit

which Lucian’s father had told him were the _vallum_ of the camp, and a

deep ditch had been dug to the north to sever it from the hillside. On

this summit oaks had grown, queer stunted-looking trees with twisted

and contorted trunks, and writhing branches; and these now stood out

black against the lighted sky. And then the air changed once more; the

flush increased, and a spot like blood appeared in the pond by the

gate, and all the clouds were touched with fiery spots and dapples of

flame; here and there it looked as if awful furnace doors were being

opened.

The wind blew wildly, and it came up through the woods with a noise

like a scream, and a great oak by the roadside ground its boughs

together with a dismal grating jar. As the red gained in the sky, the

earth and all upon it glowed, even the grey winter fields and the bare

hillsides crimsoned, the waterpools were cisterns of molten brass, and

the very road glittered. He was wonder-struck, almost aghast, before

the scarlet magic of the afterglow. The old Roman fort was invested

with fire; flames from heaven were smitten about its walls, and above

there was a dark floating cloud, like a fume of smoke, and every

haggard writhing tree showed as black as midnight against the black of

the furnace.

When he got home he heard his mother’s voice calling: “Here’s Lucian at

last. Mary, Master Lucian has come, you can get the tea ready.” He told

a long tale of his adventures, and felt somewhat mortified when his

father seemed perfectly acquainted with the whole course of the lane,

and knew the names of the wild woods through which he had passed in

awe.

“You must have gone by the Darren, I suppose”—that was all he said.

“Yes, I noticed the sunset; we shall have some stormy weather. I don’t

expect to see many in church tomorrow.”

There was buttered toast for tea “because it was holidays.” The red

curtains were drawn, and a bright fire was burning, and there was the

old familiar furniture, a little shabby, but charming from association.

It was much pleasanter than the cold and squalid schoolroom; and much

better to be reading _Chambers’s Journal_ than learning Euclid; and

better to talk to his father and mother than to be answering such

remarks as: “I say, Taylor, I’ve torn my trousers; how much do you

charge for mending?” “Lucy, dear, come quick and sew this button on my

shirt.”

That night the storm woke him, and he groped with his hands amongst the

bedclothes, and sat up, shuddering, not knowing where he was. He had

seen himself, in a dream, within the Roman fort, working some dark

horror, and the furnace doors were opened and a blast of flame from

heaven was smitten upon him.

Lucian went slowly, but not discreditably, up the school, gaining

prizes now and again, and falling in love more and more with useless

reading and unlikely knowledge. He did his elegiacs and iambics well

enough, but he preferred exercising himself in the rhymed Latin of the

middle ages. He liked history, but he loved to meditate on a land laid

waste, Britain deserted by the legions, the rare pavements riven by

frost, Celtic magic still brooding on the wild hills and in the black

depths of the forest, the rosy marbles stained with rain, and the walls

growing grey. The masters did not encourage these researches; a pure

enthusiasm, they felt, should be for cricket and football, the

_dilettanti_ might even play fives and read Shakespeare without blame,

but healthy English boys should have nothing to do with decadent

periods. He was once found guilty of recommending Villon to a

school-fellow named Barnes. Barnes tried to extract unpleasantness from

the text during preparation, and rioted in his place, owing to his

incapacity for the language. The matter was a serious one; the

headmaster had never heard of Villon, and the culprit gave up the name

of his literary admirer without remorse. Hence, sorrow for Lucian, and

complete immunity for the miserable illiterate Barnes, who resolved to

confine his researches to the Old Testament, a book which the

headmaster knew well. As for Lucian, he plodded on, learning his work

decently, and sometimes doing very creditable Latin and Greek prose.

His school-fellows thought him quite mad, and tolerated him, and indeed

were very kind to him in their barbarous manner. He often remembered in

after life acts of generosity and good nature done by wretches like

Barnes, who had no care for old French nor for curious meters, and such

recollections always moved him to emotion. Travelers tell such tales;

cast upon cruel shores amongst savage races, they have found no little

kindness and warmth of hospitality.

He looked forward to the holidays as joyfully as the rest of them.

Barnes and his friend Duscot used to tell him their plans and

anticipation; they were going home to brothers and sisters, and to

cricket, more cricket, or to football, more football, and in the winter

there were parties and jollities of all sorts. In return he would

announce his intention of studying the Hebrew language, or perhaps

Provençal, with a walk up a bare and desolate mountain by way of

open-air amusement, and on a rainy day for choice. Whereupon Barnes

would impart to Duscot his confident belief that old Taylor was quite

cracked. It was a queer, funny life that of school, and so very unlike

anything in _Tom Brown_. He once saw the headmaster patting the head of

the bishop’s little boy, while he called him “my little man,” and

smiled hideously. He told the tale grotesquely in the lower fifth room

the same day, and earned much applause, but forfeited all liking

directly by proposing a voluntary course of scholastic logic. One

barbarian threw him to the ground and another jumped on him, but it was

done very pleasantly. There were, indeed, some few of a worse class in

the school, solemn sycophants, prigs perfected from tender years, who

thought life already “serious,” and yet, as the headmaster said, were

“joyous, manly young fellows.” Some of these dressed for dinner at

home, and talked of dances when they came back in January. But this

virulent sort was comparatively infrequent, and achieved great success

in after life. Taking his school days as a whole, he always spoke up

for the system, and years afterward he described with enthusiasm the

strong beer at a roadside tavern, some way out of the town. But he

always maintained that the taste for tobacco, acquired in early life,

was the great life, was the great note of the English Public School.

Three years after Lucian’s discovery of the narrow lane and the vision

of the flaming fort, the August holidays brought him home at a time of

great heat. It was one of those memorable years of English weather,

when some Provençal spell seems wreathed round the island in the

northern sea, and the grasshoppers chirp loudly as the cicadas, the

hills smell of rosemary, and white walls of the old farmhouses blaze in

the sunlight as if they stood in Arles or Avignon or famed Tarascon by

Rhone.

Lucian’s father was late at the station, and consequently Lucian bought

the _Confessions of an English Opium Eater_ which he saw on the

bookstall. When his father did drive up, Lucian noticed that the old

trap had had a new coat of dark paint, and that the pony looked

advanced in years.

“I was afraid that I should be late, Lucian,” said his father, “though

I made old Polly go like anything. I was just going to tell George to

put her into the trap when young Philip Harris came to me in a terrible

state. He said his father fell down ‘all of a sudden like’ in the

middle of the field, and they couldn’t make him speak, and would I

please to come and see him. So I had to go, though I couldn’t do

anything for the poor fellow. They had sent for Dr. Burrows, and I am

afraid he will find it a bad case of sunstroke. The old people say they

never remember such a heat before.”

The pony jogged steadily along the burning turnpike road, taking

revenge for the hurrying on the way to the station. The hedges were

white with the limestone dust, and the vapor of heat palpitated over

the fields. Lucian showed his _Confessions_ to his father, and began to

talk of the beautiful bits he had already found. Mr. Taylor knew the

book well—had read it many years before. Indeed he was almost as

difficult to surprise as that character in Daudet, who had one formula

for all the chances of life, and when he saw the drowned Academician

dragged out of the river, merely observed “_J’ai vu tout ça._” Mr.

Taylor the parson, as his parishioners called him, had read the fine

books and loved the hills and woods, and now knew no more of pleasant

or sensational surprises. Indeed the living was much depreciated in

value, and his own private means were reduced almost to vanishing

point, and under such circumstances the great style loses many of its

finer savours. He was very fond of Lucian, and cheered by his return,

but in the evening he would be a sad man again, with his head resting

on one hand, and eyes reproaching sorry fortune.

Nobody called out “Here’s your master with Master Lucian; you can get

tea ready,” when the pony jogged up to the front door. His mother had

been dead a year, and a cousin kept house. She was a respectable person

called Deacon, of middle age, and ordinary standards; and,

consequently, there was cold mutton on the table. There was a cake, but

nothing of flour, baked in ovens, would rise at Miss Deacon’s

evocation. Still, the meal was laid in the beloved “parlor,” with the

view of hills and valleys and climbing woods from the open window, and

the old furniture was still pleasant to see, and the old books in the

shelves had many memories. One of the most respected of the armchairs

had become weak in the castors and had to be artfully propped up, but

Lucian found it very comfortable after the hard forms. When tea was

over he went out and strolled in the garden and orchards, and looked

over the stile down into the brake, where foxgloves and bracken and

broom mingled with the hazel undergrowth, where he knew of secret

glades and untracked recesses, deep in the woven green, the cabinets

for many years of his lonely meditations. Every path about his home,

every field and hedgerow had dear and friendly memories for him; and

the odour of the meadowsweet was better than the incense steaming in

the sunshine. He loitered, and hung over the stile till the far-off

woods began to turn purple, till the white mists were wreathing in the

valley.

Day after day, through all that August, morning and evening were

wrapped in haze; day after day the earth shimmered in the heat, and the

air was strange, unfamiliar. As he wandered in the lanes and sauntered

by the cool sweet verge of the woods, he saw and felt that nothing was

common or accustomed, for the sunlight transfigured the meadows and

changed all the form of the earth. Under the violent Provençal sun, the

elms and beeches looked exotic trees, and in the early morning, when

the mists were thick, the hills had put on an unearthly shape.

The one adventure of the holidays was the visit to the Roman fort, to

that fantastic hill about whose steep bastions and haggard oaks he had

seen the flames of sunset writhing nearly three years before. Ever

since that Saturday evening in January, the lonely valley had been a

desirable place to him; he had watched the green battlements in summer

and winter weather, had seen the heaped mounds rising dimly amidst the

drifting rain, had marked the violent height swim up from the ice-white

mists of summer evenings, had watched the fairy bulwarks glimmer and

vanish in hovering April twilight. In the hedge of the lane there was a

gate on which he used to lean and look down south to where the hill

surged up so suddenly, its summit defined on summer evenings not only

by the rounded ramparts but by the ring of dense green foliage that

marked the circle of oak trees. Higher up the lane, on the way he had

come that Saturday afternoon, one could see the white walls of Morgan’s

farm on the hillside to the north, and on the south there was the stile

with the view of old Mrs. Gibbon’s cottage smoke; but down in the

hollow, looking over the gate, there was no hint of human work, except

those green and antique battlements, on which the oaks stood in circle,

guarding the inner wood.

The ring of the fort drew him with stronger fascination during that hot

August weather. Standing, or as his headmaster would have said,

“mooning” by the gate, and looking into that enclosed and secret

valley, it seemed to his fancy as if there were a halo about the hill,

an aureole that played like flame around it. One afternoon as he gazed

from his station by the gate the sheer sides and the swelling bulwarks

were more than ever things of enchantment; the green oak ring stood out

against the sky as still and bright as in a picture, and Lucian, in

spite of his respect for the law of trespass, slid over the gate. The

farmers and their men were busy on the uplands with the harvest, and

the adventure was irresistible. At first he stole along by the brook in

the shadow of the alders, where the grass and the flowers of wet

meadows grew richly; but as he drew nearer to the fort, and its height

now rose sheer above him, he left all shelter, and began desperately to

mount. There was not a breath of wind; the sunlight shone down on the

bare hillside; the loud chirp of the grasshoppers was the only sound.

It was a steep ascent and grew steeper as the valley sank away. He

turned for a moment, and looked down towards the stream which now

seemed to wind remote between the alders; above the valley there were

small dark figures moving in the cornfield, and now and again there

came the faint echo of a high-pitched voice singing through the air as

on a wire. He was wet with heat; the sweat streamed off his face, and

he could feel it trickling all over his body. But above him the green

bastions rose defiant, and the dark ring of oaks promised coolness. He

pressed on, and higher, and at last began to crawl up the _vallum_, on

hands and knees, grasping the turf and here and there the roots that

had burst through the red earth. And then he lay, panting with deep

breaths, on the summit.

Within the fort it was all dusky and cool and hollow; it was as if one

stood at the bottom of a great cup. Within, the wall seemed higher than

without, and the ring of oaks curved up like a dark green vault. There

were nettles growing thick and rank in the foss; they looked different

from the common nettles in the lanes, and Lucian, letting his hand

touch a leaf by accident, felt the sting burn like fire. Beyond the

ditch there was an undergrowth, a dense thicket of trees, stunted and

old, crooked and withered by the winds into awkward and ugly forms;

beech and oak and hazel and ash and yew twisted and so shortened and

deformed that each seemed, like the nettle, of no common kind. He began

to fight his way through the ugly growth, stumbling and getting hard

knocks from the rebound of twisted boughs. His foot struck once or

twice against something harder than wood, and looking down he saw

stones white with the leprosy of age, but still showing the work of the

axe. And farther, the roots of the stunted trees gripped the foot-high

relics of a wall; and a round heap of fallen stones nourished rank,

unknown herbs, that smelt poisonous. The earth was black and unctuous,

and bubbling under the feet, left no track behind. From it, in the

darkest places where the shadow was thickest, swelled the growth of an

abominable fungus, making the still air sick with its corrupt odour,

and he shuddered as he felt the horrible thing pulped beneath his feet.

Then there was a gleam of sunlight, and as he thrust the last boughs

apart, he stumbled into the open space in the heart of the camp. It was

a lawn of sweet close turf in the center of the matted brake, of clean

firm earth from which no shameful growth sprouted, and near the middle

of the glade was a stump of a felled yew-tree, left untrimmed by the

woodman. Lucian thought it must have been made for a seat; a crooked

bough through which a little sap still ran was a support for the back,

and he sat down and rested after his toil. It was not really so

comfortable a seat as one of the school forms, but the satisfaction was

to find anything at all that would serve for a chair. He sat there,

still panting after the climb and his struggle through the dank and

jungle-like thicket, and he felt as if he were growing hotter and

hotter; the sting of the nettle was burning his hand, and the tingling

fire seemed to spread all over his body.

Suddenly, he knew that he was alone. Not merely solitary; that he had

often been amongst the woods and deep in the lanes; but now it was a

wholly different and a very strange sensation. He thought of the valley

winding far below him, all its fields by the brook green and peaceful

and still, without path or track. Then he had climbed the abrupt surge

of the hill, and passing the green and swelling battlements, the ring

of oaks, and the matted thicket, had come to the central space. And

behind there were, he knew, many desolate fields, wild as common,

untrodden, unvisited. He was utterly alone. He still grew hotter as he

sat on the stump, and at last lay down at full length on the soft

grass, and more at his ease felt the waves of heat pass over his body.

And then he began to dream, to let his fancies stray over

half-imagined, delicious things, indulging a virgin mind in its

wanderings. The hot air seemed to beat upon him in palpable waves, and

the nettle sting tingled and itched intolerably; and he was alone upon

the fairy hill, within the great mounds, within the ring of oaks, deep

in the heart of the matted thicket. Slowly and timidly he began to

untie his boots, fumbling with the laces, and glancing all the while on

every side at the ugly misshapen trees that hedged the lawn. Not a

branch was straight, not one was free, but all were interlaced and grew

one about another; and just above ground, where the cankered stems

joined the protuberant roots, there were forms that imitated the human

shape, and faces and twining limbs that amazed him. Green mosses were

hair, and tresses were stark in grey lichen; a twisted root swelled

into a limb; in the hollows of the rotted bark he saw the masks of men.

His eyes were fixed and fascinated by the simulacra of the wood, and

could not see his hands, and so at last, and suddenly, it seemed, he

lay in the sunlight, beautiful with his olive skin, dark haired, dark

eyed, the gleaming bodily vision of a strayed faun.

Quick flames now quivered in the substance of his nerves, hints of

mysteries, secrets of life passed trembling through his brain, unknown

desires stung him. As he gazed across the turf and into the thicket,

the sunshine seemed really to become green, and the contrast between

the bright glow poured on the lawn and the black shadow of the brake

made an odd flickering light, in which all the grotesque postures of

stem and root began to stir; the wood was alive. The turf beneath him

heaved and sank as with the deep swell of the sea. He fell asleep, and

lay still on the grass, in the midst of the thicket.

He found out afterwards that he must have slept for nearly an hour. The

shadows had changed when he awoke; his senses came to him with a sudden

shock, and he sat up and stared at his bare limbs in stupid amazement.

He huddled on his clothes and laced his boots, wondering what folly had

beset him. Then, while he stood indecisive, hesitating, his brain a

whirl of puzzled thought, his body trembling, his hands shaking; as

with electric heat, sudden remembrance possessed him. A flaming blush

shone red on his cheeks, and glowed and thrilled through his limbs. As

he awoke, a brief and slight breeze had stirred in a nook of the matted

boughs, and there was a glinting that might have been the flash of

sudden sunlight across shadow, and the branches rustled and murmured

for a moment, perhaps at the wind’s passage.

He stretched out his hands, and cried to his visitant to return; he

entreated the dark eyes that had shone over him, and the scarlet lips

that had kissed him. And then panic fear rushed into his heart, and he

ran blindly, dashing through the wood. He climbed the _vallum_, and

looked out, crouching, lest anybody should see him. Only the shadows

were changed, and a breath of cooler air mounted from the brook; the

fields were still and peaceful, the black figures moved, far away,

amidst the corn, and the faint echo of the high-pitched voices sang

thin and distant on the evening wind. Across the stream, in the cleft

on the hill, opposite to the fort, the blue wood smoke stole up a

spiral pillar from the chimney of old Mrs. Gibbon’s cottage. He began

to run full tilt down the steep surge of the hill, and never stopped

till he was over the gate and in the lane again. As he looked back,

down the valley to the south, and saw the violent ascent, the green

swelling bulwarks, and the dark ring of oaks; the sunlight seemed to

play about the fort with an aureole of flame.

“Where on earth have you been all this time, Lucian?” said his cousin

when he got home. “Why, you look quite ill. It is really madness of you

to go walking in such weather as this. I wonder you haven’t got a

sunstroke. And the tea must be nearly cold. I couldn’t keep your father

waiting, you know.”

He muttered something about being rather tired, and sat down to his

tea. It was not cold, for the “cozy” had been put over the pot, but it

was black and bitter strong, as his cousin expressed it. The draught

was unpalatable, but it did him good, and the thought came with great

consolation that he had only been asleep and dreaming queer,

nightmarish dreams. He shook off all his fancies with resolution, and

thought the loneliness of the camp, and the burning sunlight, and

possibly the nettle sting, which still tingled most abominably, must

have been the only factors in his farrago of impossible recollections.

He remembered that when he had felt the sting, he had seized a nettle

with thick folds of his handkerchief, and having twisted off a good

length, and put it in his pocket to show his father. Mr. Taylor was

almost interested when he came in from his evening stroll about the

garden and saw the specimen.

“Where did you manage to come across that, Lucian?” he said. “You

haven’t been to Caermaen, have you?”

“No. I got it in the Roman fort by the common.”

“Oh, the twyn. You must have been trespassing then. Do you know what it

is?”

“No. I thought it looked different from the common nettles.”

“Yes; it’s a Roman nettle—_urtica pilulifera_. It’s a rare plant.

Burrows says it’s to be found at Caermaen, but I was never able to come

across it. I must add it to the _flora_ of the parish.”

Mr. Taylor had begun to compile a _flora_ accompanied by a _hortus

siccus_, but both stayed on high shelves dusty and fragmentary. He put

the specimen on his desk, intending to fasten it in the book, but the

maid swept it away, dry and withered, in a day or two.

Lucian tossed and cried out in his sleep that night, and the awakening

in the morning was, in a measure, a renewal of the awakening in the

fort. But the impression was not so strong, and in a plain room it

seemed all delirium, a phantasmagoria. He had to go down to Caermaen in

the afternoon, for Mrs. Dixon, the vicar’s wife, had “commanded” his

presence at tea. Mr. Dixon, though fat and short and clean shaven,

ruddy of face, was a safe man, with no extreme views on anything. He

“deplored” all extreme party convictions, and thought the great needs

of our beloved Church were conciliation, moderation, and above all

“amolgamation”—so he pronounced the word. Mrs. Dixon was tall,

imposing, splendid, well fitted for the Episcopal order, with gifts

that would have shone at the palace. There were daughters, who studied

German Literature, and thought Miss Frances Ridley Havergal wrote

poetry, but Lucian had no fear of them; he dreaded the boys. Everybody

said they were such fine, manly fellows, such gentlemanly boys, with

such a good manner, sure to get on in the world. Lucian had said

“Bother!” in a very violent manner when the gracious invitation was

conveyed to him, but there was no getting out of it. Miss Deacon did

her best to make him look smart; his ties were all so disgraceful that

she had to supply the want with a narrow ribbon of a sky-blue tint; and

she brushed him so long and so violently that he quite understood why a

horse sometimes bites and sometimes kicks the groom. He set out between

two and three in a gloomy frame of mind; he knew too well what spending

the afternoon with honest manly boys meant. He found the reality more

lurid than his anticipation. The boys were in the field, and the first

remark he heard when he got in sight of the group was:

“Hullo, Lucian, how much for the tie?” “Fine tie,” another, a stranger,

observed. “You bagged it from the kitten, didn’t you?”

Then they made up a game of cricket, and he was put in first. He was

l.b.w. in his second over, so they all said, and had to field for the

rest of the afternoon. Arthur Dixon, who was about his own age,

forgetting all the laws of hospitality, told him he was a beastly muff

when he missed a catch, rather a difficult catch. He missed several

catches, and it seemed as if he were always panting after balls, which,

as Edward Dixon said, any fool, even a baby, could have stopped. At

last the game broke up, solely from Lucian’s lack of skill, as

everybody declared. Edward Dixon, who was thirteen, and had a swollen

red face and a projecting eye, wanted to fight him for spoiling the

game, and the others agreed that he funked the fight in a rather dirty

manner. The strange boy, who was called De Carti, and was understood to

be faintly related to Lord De Carti of M’Carthytown, said openly that

the fellows at his place wouldn’t stand such a sneak for five minutes.

So the afternoon passed off very pleasantly indeed, till it was time to

go into the vicarage for weak tea, homemade cake, and unripe plums. He

got away at last. As he went out at the gate, he heard De Carti’s final

observation:

“We like to dress well at our place. His governor must be beastly poor

to let him go about like that. D’ye see his trousers are all ragged at

heel? Is old Taylor a gentleman?”

It had been a very gentlemanly afternoon, but there was a certain

relief when the vicarage was far behind, and the evening smoke of the

little town, once the glorious capital of Siluria, hung haze-like over

the ragged roofs and mingled with the river mist. He looked down from

the height of the road on the huddled houses, saw the points of light

start out suddenly from the cottages on the hillside beyond, and gazed

at the long lovely valley fading in the twilight, till the darkness

came and all that remained was the somber ridge of the forest. The way

was pleasant through the solemn scented lane, with glimpses of dim

country, the vague mystery of night overshadowing the woods and

meadows. A warm wind blew gusts of odour from the meadowsweet by the

brook, now and then bee and beetle span homeward through the air,

booming a deep note as from a great organ far away, and from the verge

of the wood came the “who-oo, who-oo, who-oo” of the owls, a wild

strange sound that mingled with the whirr and rattle of the night-jar,

deep in the bracken. The moon swam up through the films of misty cloud,

and hung, a golden glorious lantern, in mid-air; and, set in the dusky

hedge, the little green fires of the glowworms appeared. He sauntered

slowly up the lane, drinking in the religion of the scene, and thinking

the country by night as mystic and wonderful as a dimly-lit cathedral.

He had quite forgotten the “manly young fellows” and their sports, and

only wished as the land began to shimmer and gleam in the moonlight

that he knew by some medium of words or colour how to represent the

loveliness about his way.

“Had a pleasant evening, Lucian?” said his father when he came in.

“Yes, I had a nice walk home. Oh, in the afternoon we played cricket. I

didn’t care for it much. There was a boy named De Carti there; he is

staying with the Dixons. Mrs. Dixon whispered to me when we were going

in to tea, ‘He’s a second cousin of Lord De Carti’s,’ and she looked

quite grave as if she were in church.”

The parson grinned grimly and lit his old pipe.

“Baron De Carti’s great-grandfather was a Dublin attorney,” he

remarked. “Which his name was Jeremiah M’Carthy. His prejudiced

fellow-citizens called him the Unjust Steward, also the Bloody

Attorney, and I believe that ‘to hell with M’Carthy’ was quite a

popular cry about the time of the Union.”

Mr. Taylor was a man of very wide and irregular reading and a tenacious

memory; he often used to wonder why he had not risen in the Church. He

had once told Mr. Dixon a singular and _drolatique_ anecdote concerning

the bishop’s college days, and he never discovered why the prelate did

not bow according to his custom when the name of Taylor was called at

the next visitation. Some people said the reason was lighted candles,

but that was impossible, as the Reverend and Honorable Smallwood

Stafford, Lord Beamys’s son, who had a cure of souls in the cathedral

city, was well known to burn no end of candles, and with him the bishop

was on the best of terms. Indeed the bishop often stayed at Coplesey

(pronounced “Copsey”) Hall, Lord Beamys’s place in the west.

Lucian had mentioned the name of De Carti with intention, and had

perhaps exaggerated a little Mrs. Dixon’s respectful manner. He knew

such incidents cheered his father, who could never look at these

subjects from a proper point of view, and, as people said, sometimes

made the strangest remarks for a clergyman. This irreverent way of

treating serious things was one of the great bonds between father and

son, but it tended to increase their isolation. People said they would

often have liked to ask Mr. Taylor to garden-parties, and tea-parties,

and other cheap entertainments, if only he had not been such an

_extreme_ man and so _queer_. Indeed, a year before, Mr. Taylor had

gone to a garden-party at the Castle, Caermaen, and had made such fun

of the bishop’s recent address on missions to the Portuguese, that

the Gervases and Dixons and all who heard him were quite shocked and

annoyed. And, as Mrs. Meyrick of Lanyravon observed, his black coat was

perfectly _green_ with age; so on the whole the Gervases did not like

to invite Mr. Taylor again. As for the son, nobody cared to have him;

Mrs. Dixon, as she said to her husband, really asked him out of charity.

“I am afraid he seldom gets a real meal at home,” she remarked, “so I

thought he would enjoy a good wholesome tea for once in a way. But he

is such an _unsatisfactory_ boy, he would only have one slice of that

nice plain cake, and I couldn’t get him to take more than two plums.

They were really quite ripe too, and boys are usually so fond of

fruit.”

Thus Lucian was forced to spend his holidays chiefly in his own

company, and make the best he could of the ripe peaches on the south

wall of the rectory garden. There was a certain corner where the heat

of that hot August seemed concentrated, reverberated from one wall to

the other, and here he liked to linger of mornings, when the mists were

still thick in the valleys, “mooning,” meditating, extending his walk

from the quince to the medlar and back again, beside the mouldering

walls of mellowed brick. He was full of a certain wonder and awe, not

unmixed with a swell of strange exultation, and wished more and more to

be alone, to think over that wonderful afternoon within the fort. In

spite of himself the impression was fading; he could not understand

that feeling of mad panic terror that drove him through the thicket and

down the steep hillside; yet, he had experienced so clearly the

physical shame and reluctance of the flesh; he recollected that for a

few seconds after his awakening the sight of his own body had made him

shudder and writhe as if it had suffered some profoundest degradation.

He saw before him a vision of two forms; a faun with tingling and

prickling flesh lay expectant in the sunlight, and there was also the

likeness of a miserable shamed boy, standing with trembling body and

shaking, unsteady hands. It was all confused, a procession of blurred

images, now of rapture and ecstasy, and now of terror and shame,

floating in a light that was altogether phantasmal and unreal. He dared

not approach the fort again; he lingered in the road to Caermaen that

passed behind it, but a mile away, and separated by the wild land and a

strip of wood from the towering battlements. Here he was looking over a

gate one day, doubtful and wondering, when he heard a heavy step behind

him, and glancing round quickly saw it was old Morgan of the White

House.

“Good afternoon, Master Lucian,” he began. “Mr. Taylor pretty well, I

suppose? I be goin’ to the house a minute; the men in the fields are

wantin’ some more cider. Would you come and taste a drop of cider,

Master Lucian? It’s very good, sir, indeed.”

Lucian did not want any cider, but he thought it would please old

Morgan if he took some, so he said he should like to taste the cider

very much indeed. Morgan was a sturdy, thick-set old man of the ancient

stock; a stiff churchman, who breakfasted regularly on fat broth and

Caerphilly cheese in the fashion of his ancestors; hot, spiced elder

wine was for winter nights, and gin for festal seasons. The farm had

always been the freehold of the family, and when Lucian, in the wake of

the yeoman, passed through the deep porch by the oaken door, down into

the long dark kitchen, he felt as though the seventeenth century still

lingered on. One mullioned window, set deep in the sloping wall, gave

all the light there was through quarries of thick glass in which there

were whorls and circles, so that the lapping rose-branch and the garden

and the fields beyond were distorted to the sight. Two heavy beams,

oaken but whitewashed, ran across the ceiling; a little glow of fire

sparkled in the great fireplace, and a curl of blue smoke fled up the

cavern of the chimney. Here was the genuine chimney-corner of our

fathers; there were seats on each side of the fireplace where one could

sit snug and sheltered on December nights, warm and merry in the

blazing light, and listen to the battle of the storm, and hear the

flame spit and hiss at the falling snowflakes. At the back of the fire

were great blackened tiles with raised initials and a date—I.M., 1684.

“Sit down, Master Lucian, sit down, sir,” said Morgan.

“Annie,” he called through one of the numerous doors, “here’s Master

Lucian, the parson, would like a drop of cider. Fetch a jug, will you,

directly?”

“Very well, father,” came the voice from the dairy and presently the

girl entered, wiping the jug she held. In his boyish way Lucian had

been a good deal disturbed by Annie Morgan; he could see her on Sundays

from his seat in church, and her skin, curiously pale, her lips that

seemed as though they were stained with some brilliant pigment, her

black hair, and the quivering black eyes, gave him odd fancies which he

had hardly shaped to himself. Annie had grown into a woman in three

years, and he was still a boy. She came into the kitchen, curtsying and

smiling.

“Good-day, Master Lucian, and how is Mr. Taylor, sir?”

“Pretty well, thank you. I hope you are well.”

“Nicely, sir, thank you. How nice your voice do sound in church, Master

Lucian, to be sure. I was telling father about it last Sunday.”

Lucian grinned and felt uncomfortable, and the girl set down the jug on

the round table and brought a glass from the dresser. She bent close

over him as she poured out the green oily cider, fragrant of the

orchard; her hand touched his shoulder for a moment, and she said, “I

beg your pardon, sir,” very prettily. He looked up eagerly at her face;

the black eyes, a little oval in shape, were shining, and the lips

smiled. Annie wore a plain dress of some black stuff, open at the

throat; her skin was beautiful. For a moment the ghost of a fancy

hovered unsubstantial in his mind; and then Annie curtsied as she

handed him the cider, and replied to his thanks with, “And welcome

kindly, sir.”

The drink was really good; not thin, nor sweet, but round and full and

generous, with a fine yellow flame twinkling through the green when one

held it up to the light. It was like a stray sunbeam hovering on the

grass in a deep orchard, and he swallowed the glassful with relish, and

had some more, warmly commending it. Mr. Morgan was touched.

“I see you do know a good thing, sir,” he said. “Is, indeed, now, it’s

good stuff, though it’s my own makin’. My old grandfather he planted

the trees in the time of the wars, and he was a very good judge of an

apple in his day and generation. And a famous grafter he was, to be

sure. You will never see no swelling in the trees he grafted at all

whatever. Now there’s James Morris, Penyrhaul, he’s a famous grafter,

too, and yet them Redstreaks he grafted for me five year ago, they be

all swollen-like below the graft already. Would you like to taste a

Blemmin pippin, now, Master Lucian? there be a few left in the loft, I

believe.”

Lucian said he should like an apple very much, and the farmer went out

by another door, and Annie stayed in the kitchen talking. She said Mrs.

Trevor, her married sister, was coming to them soon to spend a few

days.

“She’s got such a beautiful baby,” said Annie, “and he’s quite

sensible-like already, though he’s only nine months old. Mary would

like to see you, sir, if you would be so kind as to step in; that is,

if it’s not troubling you at all, Master Lucian. I suppose you must be

getting a fine scholar now, sir?”

“I am doing pretty well, thank you,” said the boy. “I was first in my

form last term.”

“Fancy! To think of that! D’you hear, father, what a scholar Master

Lucian be getting?”

“He be a rare grammarian, I’m sure,” said the farmer. “You do take

after your father, sir; I always do say that nobody have got such a

good deliverance in the pulpit.”

Lucian did not find the Blenheim Orange as good as the cider, but he

ate it with all the appearance of relish, and put another, with thanks,

in his pocket. He thanked the farmer again when he got up to go; and

Annie curtsied and smiled, and wished him good-day, and welcome,

kindly.

Lucian heard her saying to her father as he went out what a

nice-mannered young gentleman he was getting, to be sure; and he went

on his way, thinking that Annie was really very pretty, and speculating

as to whether he would have the courage to kiss her, if they met in a

dark lane. He was quite sure she would only laugh, and say, “Oh, Master

Lucian!”

For many months he had occasional fits of recollection, both cold and

hot; but the bridge of time, gradually lengthening, made those dreadful

and delicious images grow more and more indistinct, till at last they

all passed into that wonderland which a youth looks back upon in

amazement, not knowing why this used to be a symbol of terror or that

of joy. At the end of each term he would come home and find his father

a little more despondent, and harder to cheer even for a moment; and

the wall paper and the furniture grew more and more dingy and shabby.

The two cats, loved and ancient beasts, that he remembered when he was

quite a little boy, before he went to school, died miserably, one after

the other. Old Polly, the pony, at last fell down in the stable from

the weakness of old age, and had to be killed there; the battered old

trap ran no longer along the well-remembered lanes. There was long

meadow grass on the lawn, and the trained fruit trees on the wall had

got quite out of hand. At last, when Lucian was seventeen, his father

was obliged to take him from school; he could no longer afford the

fees. This was the sorry ending of many hopes, and dreams of a

double-first, a fellowship, distinction and glory that the poor parson

had long entertained for his son, and the two moped together, in the

shabby room, one on each side of the sulky fire, thinking of dead days

and finished plans, and seeing a grey future in the years that advanced

towards them. At one time there seemed some chance of a distant

relative coming forward to Lucian’s assistance; and indeed it was quite

settled that he should go up to London with certain definite aims. Mr.

Taylor told the good news to his acquaintances—his coat was too green

now for any pretence of friendship; and Lucian himself spoke of his

plans to Burrows the doctor and Mr. Dixon, and one or two others. Then

the whole scheme fell through, and the parson and his son suffered much

sympathy. People, of course, had to say they were sorry, but in reality

the news was received with high spirits, with the joy with which one

sees a stone, as it rolls down a steep place, give yet another bounding

leap towards the pool beneath. Mrs. Dixon heard the pleasant tidings

from Mrs. Colley, who came in to talk about the Mothers’ Meeting and

the Band of Hope. Mrs. Dixon was nursing little Æthelwig, or some such

name, at the time, and made many affecting observations on the general

righteousness with which the world was governed. Indeed, poor Lucian’s

disappointment seemed distinctly to increase her faith in the Divine

Order, as if it had been some example in Butler’s _Analogy_.

“Aren’t Mr. Taylor’s views very _extreme?_” she said to her husband the

same evening.

“I am afraid they are,” he replied. “I was quite _grieved_ at the last

Diocesan Conference at the way in which he spoke. The dear old bishop

had given an address on Auricular Confession; he was _forced_ to do so,

you know, after what had happened, and I must say that I never felt

prouder of our beloved Church.”

Mr. Dixon told all the Homeric story of the conference, reciting the

achievements of the champions, “deploring” this and applauding that. It

seemed that Mr. Taylor had had the audacity to quote authorities which

the bishop could not very well repudiate, though they were directly

opposed to the “safe” Episcopal pronouncement.

Mrs. Dixon of course was grieved; it was “sad” to think of a clergyman

behaving so shamefully.

“But you know, dear,” she proceeded, “I have been thinking about that

unfortunate Taylor boy and his disappointments, and after what you’ve

just told me, I am sure it’s some kind of judgment on them both. Has

Mr. Taylor forgotten the vows he took at his ordination? But don’t you

think, dear, I am right, and that he has been punished: ‘The sins of

the fathers’?”

Somehow or other Lucian divined the atmosphere of threatenings and

judgments, and shrank more and more from the small society of the

countryside. For his part, when he was not “mooning” in the beloved

fields and woods of happy memory, he shut himself up with books,

reading whatever could be found on the shelves, and amassing a store of

incongruous and obsolete knowledge. Long did he linger with the men of

the seventeenth century; delaying in the gay sunlit streets with Pepys,

and listening to the charmed sound of the Restoration Revel; roaming by

peaceful streams with Izaak Walton, and the great Catholic divines;

enchanted with the portrait of Herbert the loving ascetic; awed by the

mystic breath of Crashaw. Then the cavalier poets sang their gallant

songs; and Herrick made Dean Prior magic ground by the holy incantation

of a verse. And in the old proverbs and homely sayings of the time he

found the good and beautiful English life, a time full of grace and

dignity and rich merriment. He dived deeper and deeper into his books;

he had taken all obsolescence to be his province; in his disgust at the

stupid usual questions, “Will it pay?” “What good is it?” and so forth,

he would only read what was uncouth and useless. The strange pomp and

symbolism of the Cabala, with its hint of more terrible things; the

Rosicrucian mysteries of Fludd, the enigmas of Vaughan, dreams of

alchemists—all these were his delight. Such were his companions, with

the hills and hanging woods, the brooks and lonely waterpools; books,

the thoughts of books, the stirrings of imagination, all fused into one

phantasy by the magic of the outland country. He held himself aloof

from the walls of the fort; he was content to see the heaped mounds,

the violent height with faerie bulwarks, from the gate in the lane, and

to leave all within the ring of oaks in the mystery of his boyhood’s

vision. He professed to laugh at himself and at his fancies of that hot

August afternoon, when sleep came to him within the thicket, but in his

heart of hearts there was something that never faded—something that

glowed like the red glint of a gypsy’s fire seen from afar across the

hills and mists of the night, and known to be burning in a wild land.

Sometimes, when he was sunken in his books, the flame of delight shot

up, and showed him a whole province and continent of his nature, all

shining and aglow; and in the midst of the exultation and triumph he

would draw back, a little afraid. He had become ascetic in his studious

and melancholy isolation, and the vision of such ecstasies frightened

him. He began to write a little; at first very tentatively and feebly,

and then with more confidence. He showed some of his verses to his

father, who told him with a sigh that he had once hoped to write—in the

old days at Oxford, he added.

“They are very nicely done,” said the parson; “but I’m afraid you won’t

find anybody to print them, my boy.”

So he pottered on; reading everything, imitating what struck his fancy,

attempting the effect of the classic meters in English verse, trying

his hand at a masque, a Restoration comedy, forming impossible plans

for books which rarely got beyond half a dozen lines on a sheet of

paper; beset with splendid fancies which refused to abide before the

pen. But the vain joy of conception was not altogether vain, for it

gave him some armor about his heart.

The months went by, monotonous, and sometimes blotted with despair. He

wrote and planned and filled the waste-paper basket with hopeless

efforts. Now and then he sent verses or prose articles to magazines, in

pathetic ignorance of the trade. He felt the immense difficulty of the

career of literature without clearly understanding it; the battle was

happily in a mist, so that the host of the enemy, terribly arrayed, was

to some extent hidden. Yet there was enough of difficulty to appall;

from following the intricate course of little nameless brooks, from

hushed twilight woods, from the vision of the mountains, and the breath

of the great wind, passing from deep to deep, he would come home filled

with thoughts and emotions, mystic fancies which he yearned to

translate into the written word. And the result of the effort seemed

always to be bathos! Wooden sentences, a portentous stilted style,

obscurity, and awkwardness clogged the pen; it seemed impossible to win

the great secret of language; the stars glittered only in the darkness,

and vanished away in clearer light. The periods of despair were often

long and heavy, the victories very few and trifling; night after night

he sat writing after his father had knocked out his last pipe, filling

a page with difficulty in an hour, and usually forced to thrust the

stuff away in despair, and go unhappily to bed, conscious that after

all his labour he had done nothing. And these were moments when the

accustomed vision of the land alarmed him, and the wild domed hills and

darkling woods seemed symbols of some terrible secret in the inner life

of that stranger—himself. Sometimes when he was deep in his books and

papers, sometimes on a lonely walk, sometimes amidst the tiresome

chatter of Caermaen “society,” he would thrill with a sudden sense of

awful hidden things, and there ran that quivering flame through his

nerves that brought back the recollection of the matted thicket, and

that earlier appearance of the bare black boughs enwrapped with flames.

Indeed, though he avoided the solitary lane, and the sight of the sheer

height, with its ring of oaks and moulded mounds, the image of it grew

more intense as the symbol of certain hints and suggestions. The

exultant and insurgent flesh seemed to have its temple and castle

within those olden walls, and he longed with all his heart to escape,

to set himself free in the wilderness of London, and to be secure

amidst the murmur of modern streets.