THE PEACOCK FEATHER
A ROMANCE
BY
LESLIE MOORE
AUTHOR OF "AUNT OLIVE IN BOHEMIA" AND "THE NOTCH IN
THE STICK"
G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
The Knickerbocker Press 1914
COPYRIGHT, 1914
BY
ALSTON RIVERS, LTD.
Second Printing
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
To
MRS. G. HERBERT THRING
WITH THE AUTHOR'S LOVE
AND GRATITUDE
_September 30, 1913_
CONTENTS
PAGE
PROLOGUE 1
CHAPTER
I. THE PIPER 8
II. THE FIRST-BORN 21
III. THE DESERTED COTTAGE 26
IV. PETER TAKES A RESIDENCE 35
V. THE SOUL OF A WOMAN 44
VI. AN OLD GENERAL 52
VII. A WONDERFUL OFFER 69
VIII. CHÂTEAUX EN ESPAGNE 79
IX. A REQUEST 88
X. THE LADY ANNE 94
XI. A CONCERT--AND AFTER 103
XII. A DISCLOSURE 114
XIII. A MOONLIGHT PIPING 127
XIV. LE BEAU MONDE 131
XV. CONFIDENCES 143
XVI. LETTERS 154
XVII. A THUNDERSTORM 171
XVIII. THE EVERLASTING WHY 183
XIX. PIPER AND AUTHOR 193
XX. FAREWELL 205
XXI. A WOUNDED SKYLARK 208
XXII. CANDLES AND MASSES 216
XXIII. DUM SPIRO, SPERO 229
XXIV. DEMOCRITUS 235
XXV. AT A FAIR 245
XXVI. ON THE CLOUD 262
XXVII. A MIRACLE 271
XXVIII. THE FINE WAY 278
XXIX. FOUND 289
XXX. THE RETURN 296
XXXI. DEMOCRITUS ARRIVES TO STAY 302
XXXII. PER ASPERA AD ASTRA 306
The Peacock Feather
PROLOGUE
It was sunset.
The sea, which all day long had lain blue and sparkling, was changing
slowly to a warm grey shot with moving purple and gold. The sky flamed
with crimson and amber. But gradually the vivid warmth sank and faded;
day slowly withdrew into the soft embrace of night, and a blue-grey
mantle covered sea and sky and land. One by one the stars shone forth
till overhead the mantle was thickly powdered with their twinkling eyes.
Away across the water the gleam from the lantern of a lightship
appeared at intervals, while every now and then a stronger flash from
a distant lighthouse lit up the darkness. It flung its rays broadcast,
across the water, across the land, bringing momentarily into startling
prominence a great mass of building standing on the top of the cliffs.
In the building a man was clinging with both hands to a couple of iron
bars that guarded the narrow opening of his cell window. He could see
across the water and up to the star-embroidered mantle of the sky.
Night after night for three years he had looked at that moving water.
He had seen it lying calm and peaceful as it lay to-night; he had seen
it rearing angry foam-crested waves from inky blackness. He had heard
its soft, sighing music; he had heard its sullen roar.
Three years! More than a thousand nights he had looked from that narrow
slit of a window, his hands fast clutching the bars, his feet finding
slight and precarious foothold in the uneven surface of the wall!
And to-night he looked for the last time. To-morrow he would be free,
free as the sea-gulls which circled and dipped in the water along the
rocky coast or rose screaming and battling against the tearing wind.
He slipped down from the window and crossed to his pallet bed.
Free! Until to-night he had never dared even to whisper that word to
his inmost soul. Throughout the long three years he had refused to let
himself think for more than the day, the moment. He had held his mind
in close confinement, a confinement even more stringent than that to
which his body was subjected.
Now in that little cell he opened the windows of his soul and let his
mind go forth. Radiant, exuberant, it escaped from its cage. It came
forth singing a Te Deum. Only a few more hours and dawn would break.
His body would know the liberty he had already given to his mind. He
was too happy to sleep. He lay wakeful and very still on his bed, the
silence only occasionally broken by the footfall of a warder in the
passage outside.
The night wore on. Gradually the stars dropped back one by one into the
sky, and away in the east a streak of saffron light appeared. It was
day at last.
* * * * *
Six hours later a man was walking along a country road. His step was
light and his face held up to meet the fresh March wind that was
blowing across the fields and hedges.
Daffodils nodded their golden heads at him from the banks as he passed,
and tiny green buds on the brown branches were pushing forward to the
light. The whole world was vital, radiant, teeming with growth.
The man held one hand in the pocket of his grey flannel coat, his
fingers pressing on two envelopes which lay there. They had been handed
to him just before he left the great grey prison. He had not yet opened
them. For one thing, he wanted to put a certain distance between his
present self and the past three years before he broke the seals. For
another thing, he was denying himself, prolonging the pleasure of
anticipation.
Now he saw a stile before him, set in the hedge a little way back from
the road, and with a patch of grass before it. In the grass gleamed a
few pink-tipped daisies.
The man went across the grass and sat down on the stile. He pulled the
two letters from his pocket and looked at them. One was addressed in a
masculine handwriting, small, square, and very firm. The other writing
was delicate but larger. It was evidently that of a woman.
He opened the firmly addressed envelope first, and pulled out its
contents. A strip of pink paper fluttered to the ground, falling among
the daisies. He picked it up without looking at it while he read the
contents of the letter.
"I have no desire that you should starve, and therefore send you the
enclosed. Kindly understand, however, that I do not wish to see you
for the present. When you have partially blotted out the past by
obtaining decent work and proving your repentance, I will reconsider
this decision.
"RICHARD CARDEN."
The cheque was for two hundred pounds.
The man laughed, but the sound of his laugh was not very pleasant.
He broke the seal of the second letter.
"I did not write before," the letter ran, "because I did not want you
to brood over what I have to say, though you must have known that my
saying it was inevitable. Of course you have known from the first
that you have by your own conduct put an end to our engagement. I did
not write at once and tell you so myself, for fear of adding to your
pain. But you must have understood. You will not attempt to see me, or
write to me. It would be quite useless. I am going to be married in
three weeks' time. I am very sorry for you and I would have helped you
if I could, but you must see for yourself it is impossible. There is
nothing now to say but good-bye.
"M."
When the man had finished reading he sat very still, so still that a
robin hopped down near him and began investigating the toe of his boot.
Finding nothing in a piece of black leather of interest, it flew up to
the hedge, and regarded the motionless figure with round beady eyes. At
last the figure moved. The robin flew a couple of yards farther away,
then perched again to watch.
It saw the man tearing white and pink paper into very small pieces.
Then it saw him bend down and dig a hole in the earth with a
clasp-knife. It saw him place the pieces of torn paper in the hole and
replace the earth, which he pressed firmly down. Then it heard the man
speak.
"At least I will give the past decent burial."
The robin did not understand the words. What has a gay little
redbreast to do with either the past or the future? The moment is quite
enough.
Then the man stood up, and the robin saw his face. It had grown much
older in the last twenty minutes.
"And now," said the man jauntily, though his eyes belied the
carelessness of the words, "for the open road."
Perhaps the robin understood that speech. At any rate it sang a sweet
sturdy song of Amen.
CHAPTER I
THE PIPER
Peter was sitting under a hedge, playing on a penny whistle. Behind him
was a bush, snowy with the white flowers of the hawthorn. In front of
him was a field, warm with the gold of buttercups. Away in a distant
valley were the roofs of cottages and a farmhouse. The smoke from one
of its chimneys rose thin and blue in the still air. It was all very
peaceful, ideally English.
Peter was an artist. It seemed almost incredible that a tin instrument
which could be purchased for a penny could be made to produce such
sounds.
He was playing a joyous lilt. You could hear the song of birds and feel
the soft west wind blowing from distant places; and through it was a
measured beat as of feet walking along the open road. Yet under all
the gaiety and light-heartedness lay a strange minor note, a note that
somehow found reflection in Peter's blue eyes.
Peter finished his tune and put the whistle-pipe in his pocket. From a
wallet beside him he pulled out a hunch of bread and cheese and a very
red and shiny apple. He opened a large clasp-knife, cut the hunch of
bread in two, and fell to eating slowly. His hands were long-fingered,
flexible, and very brown. There was a lean, muscular look about Peter
altogether. His clothes were distinctly shabby. They consisted of a
pair of grey trousers, very frayed at the edges, and with a patch of
some darker material on one knee; a soft white shirt, spotlessly clean;
and a loose jacket, grey flannel like the trousers. A felt hat lay on
the ground near him. In it was fantastically stuck a peacock feather.
Beside the hat was a small bundle rolled up in a bit of sacking.
Peter finished the bread and cheese and the apple, and put the
clasp-knife back into his pocket. From another pocket he pulled out
a small book, the cover rather limp and worn. He tucked the bundle
behind his back and opened the book. Its contents did not long engross
him. The warm May sun and the fact that he had tramped a considerable
number of miles since sunrise had a soporific effect on Peter. His
fingers gradually relaxed their hold, the book fell to the ground, and
Peter slept.
His slumber was so deep that he did not hear the footfall of a man
on the soft grass, nor did he stir when the man came near and stood
looking down upon him. He was a man of medium height and build, with
brown hair, small moustache, and rather light eyes. There was about him
an air of finish, yet he quite escaped the epithet of dapper.
For a moment or so he stood looking down upon the recumbent figure. He
took in every detail, from the frayed trousers and the spotless shirt
to the fantastic feather in the hat. He saw that the sleeper's face was
clean-shaven, bronzed, and with rather high cheek-bones. The hair was
dark. There was in the sleeping face a look of quiet weariness. To the
man watching him it was the face of one who was lonely.
Then his eye fell upon the book. He stooped down and gently picked it
up. The book was open at the following lines:
"Sin I fro Love escaped am so fat,
I never thenk to ben in his prison lene;
Sin I am free, I counte him not a bene.
He may answere, and say this or that;
I do no fors, I speke right as I mene.
Sin I fro Love escaped am so fat,
I never thenk to ben in his prison lene.
"Love hath my name y-strike out of his sclat,
And he is strike out of my bokes clene
For ever-mo; ther is non other mene.
Sin I fro Love escaped am so fat,
I never thenk to ben in his prison lene;
Sin I am free, I counte him not a bene."
Ten minutes later Peter stirred and yawned. He sat up and began to
stretch himself. But in the very act thereof he stopped, and a gleam of
humorous amazement shot into his blue eyes, for on the grass beside him
a man was sitting, calmly reading from his own rather shabby book.
The man looked up.
"Don't let me interrupt you," said Peter, with a brilliant smile.
The man laughed. "I ought to apologize," he said. "The fact is, when I
first saw you lying there asleep I took you for a tramp. Then I came
nearer and saw my mistake. I also saw the book. The temptation to talk
to a man who obviously loved the open air and read Chaucer was too much
for me. I sat down to wait till you should awake."
"Very good of you," replied Peter. "But you didn't make a mistake, I am
a tramp."
"So am I," responded the other, "on a walking tour."
Peter sat up very deliberately now. He broke off a piece of grass,
which he began to nibble. Through the nibbling he spoke:
"But I presume that your walking tour is of fairly brief duration; mine
has lasted rather more than two years."
The other man looked at him curiously. "You love the open as much as
that?"
"Oh, I love the open well enough," replied Peter airily; "but that's
not the whole reason. I can't afford a roof."
Now, the very obvious reply to this would have been that Peter, a young
man and, moreover, clearly one of education, might very well work for a
roof. But it being so extremely obvious that this was what Peter might
do, it was also obvious that there was some excellent reason why he
did not do it.
The man was silent. Peter appreciated his silence.
"The fact is," said Peter deliberately, "that prior to my starting this
'walking tour,' as you so kindly term it, I had spent three years in
prison for forgery and embezzling a considerable sum of money."
"Ah!" said the man quietly, watching him.
"There are always the colonies," went on Peter carelessly. "But
somehow I've a predilection for England. Of course, in England there
is the disadvantage that you're bound to produce references if you
want work--I mean the kind of work that would appeal to me. I dare say
I might get taken on as a day labourer on a farm, but even there my
speech is against me; it makes people suspicious."
"But how do you manage?" asked the other curiously.
Peter laughed. He pulled his whistle-pipe from his pocket.
"I pipe for my bread," he said. "They call me Peter the Piper."
The other man nodded. "Good," he said; "I like that. There's a flavour
of romance about it that appeals to me. My name's Neil Macdonald."
Peter looked at him. "Then you don't mind introducing yourself to
a jail-bird?" he asked jauntily; but there was an underhint of
wistfulness in the words.
"My dear fellow," responded Neil, "I have some intuition. It's so
absolutely apparent that you must have been shielding some one else,
that----"
Peter interrupted him. The pupils of his blue eyes had contracted till
they looked like two pinpricks.
"I beg your pardon," he said slowly; "I said that _I_ spent three years
in prison for forgery and embezzlement." He looked Neil full in the
face.
Neil held out his hand. "I apologize," he said; "it was extremely
clumsy of me."
Peter took his hand with a light laugh. "It was rather decent of you,
all the same," he said, "though, of course, utterly absurd. You're the
first man, though, that's committed the absurdity. You happen, too, to
be the first man with whom I've shaken hands since I freed myself from
the clasp of a Salvation Army brother who met me outside the prison
gates and talked about my soul. I hadn't the smallest interest in my
soul at the moment. I wanted a cigarette and a drink more than anything
in heaven or earth. He was a good-meaning fellow, of course, but--well,
just a little wanting in tact. Of course, there were others ready to
hold out the hand of pity if I'd asked for it. But there'd have been
something slippery about the touch. The oil of charity doesn't appeal
to me."
There was a pause. Somewhere in the blueness a lark was singing, an
exuberant feathered morsel, pouring forth his very soul in song.
Neil broke the silence. "Pipe to me," he said.
Peter laughed. He pulled the whistle from his pocket, and his fingers
held it very lovingly. He put it to his lips.
First there came a couple of clear notes, like a bird-call; they
repeated themselves in the distance and were answered. Then the air
became alive with the joyous warbling of feathered choristers, and
through the warbling came the sound of little rills chasing each other
over brown stones, where fish darted in the sunlight and dragonflies
skimmed. Next, across a meadow--one knew it was a meadow--came the
sound of little feet and children's laughter. And the sound of the
laughter and the babbling of the water and the song of the birds were
all mingled in one delicious bubbling melody drawn from the very heart
of Nature. It came to a pause. You felt the children, the birds, and
the brooks hold their breath to listen. And then from the branches of
some tree a hidden nightingale sang alone.
Peter stopped, wiped the pipe on his sleeve, and put it back in his
pocket.
"Marvellous!" breathed Neil softly.
Again there was a pause, and again it was broken by Neil.
"I say, will you come back and have lunch with me?" There was a frank
spontaneity about the question.
Again the wistful look crept into Peter's blue eyes. The suggestion
coming suddenly was evidently somewhat of a temptation.
"I believe I'd like to," he said lightly, "but----"
"Well?" asked Neil.
Peter shook his head. "I think not," he said. "There are quite nine
hundred and ninety-nine reasons against it, and only one for it."
"And isn't the one reason good enough to counteract the others?"
Peter laughed. "I fancy not. The high-road has claimed me, the
hedge-side is my dining-place, the sky my roof. When it is too unkind
to me, I seek shelter in a barn. I've struck up a kind of silent
intimacy with cows, sheep, and horses. I've found them, indeed, quite
pleased to welcome me."
"It must be horribly lonely," said Neil impulsively.
Peter looked away across the valley. "I wonder," he said. "Perhaps it
only appears so. Formerly I walked the earth in company, and when I got
near enough to a fellow-creature to believe that I had the right to
call him comrade, I suddenly realized that I was looking into the face
of a complete stranger. Somehow the loneliness struck deeper home at
those moments. Now--well, one just expects nothing."
Neil glanced down at the book he was still holding in his hand.
Peter smiled.
"Love hath my name y-strike out of his sclat,
And he is strike out of my bokes clene
For ever-mo ...
Sin I am free I counte him not a bene,"
he quoted. "There's a freedom about that, a kind of clean-washedness
which is very wholesome; the fresh rain upon one's face in high places
after a room full of hot-house flowers." He stopped. "Heaven knows why
I am talking to you like this," he said whimsically.
"I don't fancy," said Neil calmly, "that you've ever been really in
love."
"No?" smiled Peter.
"Of course, you think you have," went on Neil.
"Indeed?" smiled Peter again.
"Oh, I'm not going to argue with you," said the other good-humouredly,
"only when the time comes that you do love, just do me the favour to
remember what I've said."
"'He is strike out of my bokes clene,'"
quoted Peter again, looking at Neil lazily.
"There is," said Neil, "such a thing as invisible ink. There are
certain words written with it on the pages of our lives. The pages look
uncommonly blank, but should they chance to catch certain heat-rays,
the words written upon them will stand out very black and clear."
"Humph!" said Peter.
"Wait and see," said Neil.
"All right," said Peter. And then he got to his feet. He picked up
his wallet, bundle, and the hat with the peacock feather. He put it
jauntily on his head.
"I must be moving on," he said.
Neil, too, had risen. He held out the limp book. Peter took it and put
it in his pocket.
"Chaucer or you," he said, "which am I to believe?"
"Believe which you like," retorted Neil. "Time will bring the proof.
I'm glad I met you." He held out his hand.
Peter took it. "Common politeness," he said, "should make me echo
that sentiment. Truth obliges me to hesitate. Yet frankly I like you.
Perhaps you have sufficient acumen to guess at the reason for my
hesitation. Well, good-bye."
Peter vaulted over a stile that led into the high-road. He turned and
waved his hat in the direction of the man looking after him, then
started off at a swinging pace. Ten minutes took him into the valley,
then he began to ascend. Part way up the hill he turned and looked at
the now distant field.
"Oh, damn!" he said half ruefully. "Why the devil did I meet him!"