Mystagogus
The sail was loosed, the boat touched the stone step, and Feltram sprang
out and made her fast to the old iron ring. The Baronet followed. So! he
had ventured upon that water without being drowned. He looked round him
as if in a dream. He had not been there since his childhood. There were
no regrets, no sentiment, no remorse; only an odd return of the
associations and fresh feelings of boyhood, and a long reach of time
suddenly annihilated.
The little hollow in which he stood; the three hawthorn trees at his
right; every crease and undulation of the sward, every angle and crack
in the lichen-covered rock at his feet, recurred with a sharp and
instantaneous recognition to his memory.
"Many a time your brother and I fished for hours together from that bank
there, just where the bramble grows. That bramble has not grown an inch
ever since, not a leaf altered; we used to pick blackberries off it,
with our rods stuck in the bank--it was later in the year than now--till
we stript it quite bare after a day or two. The steward used to come
over--they were marking timber for cutting and we used to stay here
while they rambled through the wood, with an axe marking the trees that
were to come down. I wonder whether the big old boat is still anywhere.
I suppose she was broken up, or left to rot; I have not seen her since
we came home. It was in the wood that lies at the right--the other wood
is called the forest; they say in old times it was eight miles long,
northward up the shore of the lake, and full of deer; with a forester,
and a reeve, and a verderer, and all that. Your brother was older than
you; he went to India, or the Colonies; is he living still?"
"I care not."
"That's good-natured, at all events; but do you know?"
"Not I; and what matter? If he's living, I warrant he has his share of
the curse, the sweat of his brow and his bitter crust; and if he is
dead, he's dust or worse, he's rotten, and smells accordingly."
Sir Bale looked at him; for this was the brother over whom, only a year
or two ago, Philip used to cry tears of pathetic longing. Feltram looked
darkly in his face, and sneered with a cold laugh.
"I suppose you mean to jest?" said Sir Bale.
"Not I; it is the truth. It is what you'd say, if you were honest. If
he's alive, let him keep where he is; and if he's dead, I'll have none
of him, body or soul. Do you hear that sound?"
"Like the wind moaning in the forest?"
"Yes."
"But I feel no wind. There's hardly a leaf stirring."
"I think so," said Feltram. "Come along."
And he began striding up the gentle slope of the glen, with many a rock
peeping through its sward, and tufted ferns and furze, giving a wild and
neglected character to the scene; the background of which, where the
glen loses itself in a distant turn, is formed by its craggy and wooded
side.
Up they marched, side by side, in silence, towards that irregular clump
of trees, to which Feltram had pointed from the Mardykes side.
As they approached, it showed more scattered, and two or three of the
trees were of grander dimensions than in the distance they had appeared;
and as they walked, the broad valley of Cloostedd Forest opened grandly
on their left, studding the sides of the valley with solitary trees or
groups, which thickened as it descended to the broad level, in parts
nearly three miles wide, on which stands the noble forest of Cloostedd,
now majestically reposing in the stirless air, gilded and flushed with
the melancholy tints of autumn.
I am now going to relate wonderful things; but they rest on the report,
strangely consistent, it is true, of Sir Bale Mardykes. That all his
senses, however, were sick and feverish, and his brain not quite to be
relied on at that moment, is a fact of which sceptics have a right to
make all they please and can.
Startled at their approach, a bird like a huge mackaw bounced from the
boughs of the trees, and sped away, every now and then upon the ground,
toward the shelter of the forest, fluttering and hopping close by the
side of the little brook which, emerging from the forest, winds into the
glen, and beside the course of which Sir Bale and Philip Feltram had
ascended from the margin of the lake.
It fluttered on, as if one of its wings were hurt, and kept hopping and
bobbing and flying along the grass at its swiftest, screaming all the
time discordantly.
"That must be old Mrs. Amerald's bird, that got away a week ago," said
Sir Bale, stopping and looking after it. "Was not it a mackaw?"
"No," said Feltram; "that was a gray parrot; but there are stranger
birds in Cloostedd Forest, for my ancestors collected all that would
live in our climate, and were at pains to find them the food and shelter
they were accustomed to until they grew hardy--that is how it happens."
"By Jove, that's a secret worth knowing," said Sir Bale. "That would
make quite a feature. What a fat brute that bird was! and green and
dusky-crimson and yellow; but its head is white--age, I suspect; and
what a broken beak--hideous bird! splendid plumage; something between a
mackaw and a vulture."
Sir Bale spoke jocularly, but with the interest of a bird-fancier; a
taste which, when young, he had indulged; and for the moment forgot his
cares and the object of his unwonted excursion.
A moment after, a lank slim bird, perfectly white, started from the same
boughs, and winged its way to the forest.
"A kite, I think; but its body is a little too long, isn't it?" said Sir
Bale again, stopping and looking after its flight also.
"A foreign kite, I daresay?" said Feltram.
All this time there was hopping near them a jay, with the tameness of a
bird accustomed to these solitudes. It peered over its slender wing
curiously at the visitors; pecking here and nodding there; and thus
hopping, it made a circle round them more than once. Then it fluttered
up, and perched on a bough of the old oak, from the deep labyrinth of
whose branches the other birds had emerged; and from thence it flew down
and lighted on the broad druidic stone, that stood like a cyclopean
table on its sunken stone props, before the snakelike roots of the oak.
Across this it hopped conceitedly, as over a stage on which it figured
becomingly; and after a momentary hesitation, with a little spring, it
rose and winged its way in the same direction which the other birds had
taken, and was quickly lost in thick forest to the left.
"Here," said Feltram, "this is the tree."
"I remember it well! A gigantic trunk; and, yes, those marks; but I
never before read them as letters. Yes, H.F., so they are--very odd I
should not have remarked them. They are so large, and so strangely
drawn-out in some places, and filled-in in others, and distorted, and
the moss has grown about them; I don't wonder I took them for natural
cracks and chasms in the bark," said Sir Bale.
"Very like," said Feltram.
Sir Bale had remarked, ever since they had begun their walk from the
shore, that Feltram seemed to undergo a gloomy change. Sharper, grimmer,
wilder grew his features, and shadow after shadow darkened his face
wickedly.
The solitude and grandeur of the forest, and the repulsive gloom of his
companion's countenance and demeanour, communicated a tone of anxiety to
Sir Bale; and they stood still, side by side, in total silence for a
time, looking toward the forest glades; between themselves and which, on
the level sward of the valley, stood many a noble tree and fantastic
group of forked birch and thorn, in the irregular formations into which
Nature had thrown them.
"Now you stand between the letters. Cast your eyes on the stone," said
Feltram suddenly, and his low stern tones almost startled the Baronet.
Looking round, he perceived that he had so placed himself that his point
of vision was exactly from between the two great letters, now
half-obliterated, which he had been scrutinizing just as he turned about
to look toward the forest of Cloostedd.
"Yes, so I am," said Sir Bale.
There was within him an excitement and misgiving, akin to the sensation
of a man going into battle, and which corresponded with the pale and
sombre frown which Feltram wore, and the manifest change which had come
over him.
"Look on the stone steadily for a time, and tell me if you see a black
mark, about the size of your hand, anywhere upon its surface," said
Feltram.
Sir Bale affected no airs of scepticism now; his imagination was
stirred, and a sense of some unknown reality at the bottom of that which
he had affected to treat before as illusion, inspired a strange interest
in the experiment.
"Do you see it?" asked Feltram.
Sir Bale was watching patiently, but he had observed nothing of the
kind.
Sharper, darker, more eager grew the face of Philip Feltram, as his eyes
traversed the surface of that huge horizontal block.
"Now?" asked Feltram again.
No, he had seen nothing.
Feltram was growing manifestly uneasy, angry almost; he walked away a
little, and back again, and then two or three times round the tree, with
his hands shut, and treading the ground like a man trying to warm his
feet, and so impatiently he returned, and looked again on the stone.
Sir Bale was still looking, and very soon said, drawing his brows
together and looking hard,
"Ha!--yes--hush. There it is, by Jove!--wait--yes--there; it is growing
quite plain."
It seemed not as if a shadow fell upon the stone, but rather as if the
stone became semi-transparent, and just under its surface was something
dark--a hand, he thought it--and darker and darker it grew, as if coming
up toward the surface, and after some little wavering, it fixed itself
movelessly, pointing, as he thought, toward the forest.
"It looks like a hand," said he. "By Jove, it is a hand--pointing
towards the forest with a finger."
"Don't mind the finger; look only on that black blurred mark, and from
the point where you stand, taking that point for your direction, look to
the forest. Take some tree or other landmark for an object, enter the
forest there, and pursue the same line, as well as you can, until you
find little flowers with leaves like wood-sorrel, and with tall stems
and a red blossom, not larger than a drop, such as you have not seen
before, growing among the trees, and follow wherever they seem to grow
thickest, and there you will find him."
All the time that Feltram was making this little address, Sir Bale was
endeavouring to fix his route by such indications as Feltram described;
and when he had succeeded in quite establishing the form of a peculiar
tree--a melancholy ash, one huge limb of which had been blasted by
lightning, and its partly stricken arm stood high and barkless,
stretching its white fingers, as it were, in invitation into the forest,
and signing the way for him----
"I have it now," said he. "Come Feltram, you'll come a bit of the way
with me."
Feltram made no answer, but slowly shook his head, and turned and walked
away, leaving Sir Bale to undertake his adventure alone.
The strange sound they had heard from the midst of the forest, like the
rumble of a storm or the far-off trembling of a furnace, had quite
ceased. Not a bird was hopping on the grass, or visible on bough or in
the sky. Not a living creature was in sight--never was stillness more
complete, or silence more oppressive.
It would have been ridiculous to give way to the old reluctance which
struggled within him. Feltram had strode down the slope, and was
concealed by a screen of bushes from his view. So alone, and full of an
interest quite new to him, he set out in quest of his adventures.