THE EYES IN THE CLEFT
The giant trees of the great forest streaked the velvety glades with
their lengthening shadows as the autumn sun touched the broken outline
of the mountain screen and sent the last of its blaze sweeping through
the valley and flooding its alleys with purple light. A solitary
ray, finding, as it were, the clue to the maze where the forest was
thickest, stretched with insistent brilliance across a natural arbour
which lay in the most sheltered recesses of the woodland depths. This
somewhat abnormal feature of the sylvan region reared itself in a
hollow a score of paces from one of the forest paths, and was formed
in the largest of the rocks which here for a space of perhaps fifty
yards square bulged out and reared themselves, a rough excrescence on
the plush-like ground, and, as it might seem, an outpost of the huge
battalions towering in their grandeur but a short league away.
On one side of this rocky dell the overhanging escarpment formed a
shallow recess, and in this, on the rough bench afforded by a ledge
of rock, sat Philippa and Von Tressen. The light falling athwart
the retreat and intercepted and split up by the sharp angles of the
projecting roof, just tinged with a stray glimmer the girl’s gold-brown
hair and sparkled in the jewel on the hand which lay on her lover’s
arm. They had met that afternoon by arrangement, and Philippa had
chosen the way to that secluded spot as lying in a part of the forest
where riding was hardly practicable, and so out of Count Zarka’s beat.
Von Tressen had divined the reason and gently taxed her with it.
“Why need you seek so far for a motive,” she returned with laughing
evasion. “Is this all the thanks I get for bringing you to see this
romantic dell? It is the beauty spot of, at any rate, this part of the
forest. I found it out by accident the other day, and----”
“Thought it wanted only one thing to complete its romance,” he laughed.
“No, sir; I thought nothing of the sort. It was before----” she stopped
suddenly.
But it was too late. “Before you knew me, Philippa?” he supplied, with
all an accepted lover’s confidence. “Yes? Now you shall not deny it.
Did it seem as delightful then as it does to-day?”
“Hardly,” she returned archly. “There was no sun that day; it was grey
and dull, but the place was lovely nevertheless.”
“Nothing like this?” he urged.
“I am glad to see it in the glory of the sunlight,” she said, still
baffling him.
“And with me, Philippa?”
“I wanted to bring you to see it,” she replied fencingly, although her
eyes played traitor to her tone of laughing indifference. “It has been
a long walk, and I hope you are grateful. You know, sir, you would
probably never have discovered it for yourself; or if you had passed
by, your mind would have been so full of partridges and hares that you
would never have noticed it.”
“And so Count Zarka has nothing to do with our coming here?” he
persisted, only half convinced, and still unable to feel happy on the
subject.
“Why must you harp on the Count?” she protested with a little natural
impatience. “Can you not enjoy the short hour we have without letting
that shadow come between us? Is it not as well that we took this
secluded way, or would you rather we went where the Count would be
likely to light upon us? I did not know you thought so much of him.”
“I think very little of him, dearest,” he replied. “I only wish you
regarded him as indifferently as I. It is because I feel you do not
that I confess I am not satisfied.”
“You silly boy!” she laughed. “I tell you the Count is nothing to me.”
“You are not afraid of him?”
“No, no,” she protested.
“You are, Philippa,” he maintained. “Do tell me why,” he added
persuasively.
“No,” she replied, with an effort to mask the troubled thought which
lay behind her words. “How can I, when I tell you it is not so? Count
Zarka is nothing to me.”
“An object of fear?”
“No; why should he be?”
“That is what you must tell me.”
“Osbert,” she said impetuously, “you are determined to make me
wretched. Can you not, to please me, dismiss the subject of Count
Zarka? I hate it as I hate him.”
“Yet you are always with him?” he persisted dubiously.
“Can I help it if he comes every day to the farm? He has business with
my father.”
Von Tressen’s face was troubled. It was clear he felt far from
satisfied. But what more could he urge? His expression darkened as
though a cloud of gloom had drifted over him. For some moments there
was silence. Then Philippa laid her hand lovingly on his arm.
“Osbert,” she pleaded; “you are unkind to me; unkind to let these
suspicions run in your mind. Can you not trust me? Is your love so
shallow that it cannot believe my word against all appearances? Does
it ask so much that I must prove to you that I love you and hate Zarka?
How can I do that?”
His answer was ready. “Will you tell your father and the Count that we
are betrothed?”
She met his eyes steadfastly. “In a week,” she answered without
faltering.
“Not now?”
“Osbert, is this fair?”
His innate chivalry ousted his jealous suspicion. “Forgive me,
darling,” he said, as love lighted up his face and its gloom vanished;
“forgive me that I am so unkind. I do not deserve that you should love
me when I torment you so. But I distrust this man Zarka; I know him to
be bad and unscrupulous, and, worst of all, to be in love with you.
Is it a wonder that I am troubled when I see the fear he inspires you
with?”
“No, no; not fear,” she protested.
“I am sure you fear him, dear one.”
“Then you are wrong. Avoidance does not necessarily imply fear. Why
will you persist in thinking that? You must have faith in me, Osbert.”
He could hardly resist that appeal backed by the love that was in the
look she gave him. “I am offending again; how can I ask for pardon?”
he said lovingly. “Only if you knew how I long for the end of this
mystery--for there surely is a mystery, Philippa--to call you mine
before the world, to defy and triumph over this scheming fellow, Zarka,
you would not be hard on me. I want the sunshine for our love, not to
have to lurk with it in the shade.”
“And it shall be,” she returned in the same tone. “Only one week, and
the mist shall clear away, if indeed there be one?”
“Is there not?” he asked, smiling wistfully.
“Need there be?” she rejoined. “Is not the sun upon us now. Ah, how
lovely, it is! Osbert, why will you torment yourself by seeing nothing
but gloom?”
“I am a fool,” he said, as his trouble seemed to vanish. “At any rate,
if there is a little cloud over us, I might know that the sun is behind
it. My sun my glorious love, Philippa, my darling.”
He took her in his arms and kissed her. Suddenly she gave a cry and
started up pushing him excitedly from her.
“Philippa!” he cried. “What is it?”
Her eyes were fixed on the irregular wall of rock which ran along the
opposite side of the dell. “There,” she exclaimed under her breath, in
terror as though not daring to raise her voice, “there, in that cleft,
a man’s eyes; so horrible! Ah!”
She shuddered in fear.
“I can see nothing, dearest,” her lover said, reassuringly.
“They are gone now,” she returned, hardly daring to look towards the
place. “But I saw them; they were there, glaring at us.”
“I will soon satisfy you,” he cried, leaving her and hurrying forward.
But she followed and clung to him. “No, no! Osbert, my love, stay here!
Do not go; there is danger,” she implored.
It was scarcely the argument to avail with a soldier, and with a
confident smile he released himself.
“I must go and see,” he insisted. “I will not have you frightened, dear
one.”
He ran to a spot where the rocks shelved down and afforded a
possibility of climbing. It was not by any means an easy ascent, but
to an active man it was quicker than going by the level outlet round
to the back of the rocks. Philippa followed him half way across the
hollow; then stopped, watching him breathlessly. In a few seconds he
stood on the rocky escarpment and looked all round.
“No one here; no one to be seen,” he called to her encouragingly.
But the fear did not leave her face: she was not reassured.
“Come back, Osbert,” she exclaimed, “You will find no one there now.”
He stayed a little, making a cursory examination of the place, and then
rejoined her.
“Nothing to be seen,” he announced cheerfully, “Not a sign of man or
beast.”
“I am certain there was some one there,” she insisted. “Ah, those
hateful eyes!”
He put his arm round her protectingly. “Dearest, you must not alarm
yourself so. It was not another of your wild boars, was it?”
“No, no. It was a man.”
“Need you be afraid of him? It was not the only man in the world, or in
the forest,” he added with a confident smile. Then his face darkened a
little as he said, “Was it the Count?”
“Count Zarka?” She spoke with an effort, “I could not tell. No. How
could it have been he? Osbert, you are sure you saw no one?”
“Quite sure,” he answered. He could see that it needed all her
self-command to restrain the betrayal of her fear. “Let us go back to
our seat,” he said, “and watch for the mysterious eyes to re-appear, I
promise you their owner shall not escape me a second time.”
“No, no,” she objected, “I must be going homewards now. It is getting
late, and my father will wonder at my absence.”
“Must you go so soon, Philippa?” he protested.
“Yes, indeed,” she answered, evidently anxious to get away from the
place. “We can walk slowly,” she added with a smile that bore down his
protest. “I love sauntering through the forest, it is a shame to hurry;
but you know we have a long way to go.”
With that they went up out of the dell, Von Tressen looking round him
sharply as they gained the level ground outside, but seeing nothing
that could account for Philippa’s fright.
“Why did you ask me whether it was Count Zarka?” she said presently.
“Your fear put it into my head,” he answered frankly.
“Are there no other living things to fear in the forest?” she demanded,
regaining a more confident tone as they left the somewhat eerie dell
behind them. “You forget how lately my life was in peril, and can
hardly wonder if my nerves are shaken.”
“I dare say it is to be accounted for by that,” he said reassuringly.
“You have plenty of courage, Philippa, more than most women, and that
makes me wonder at your evident fear of the Count.”
“It is you who make a bugbear of him,” she objected, although not very
convincingly. “Ah----”
With the exclamation she caught her lover’s arm and drew him back from
the glade they had been about to cross. Von Tressen had seen nothing
and looked at her for an explanation. The fear had returned to her
face, which had now gone white to the lips.
“What is it?” he asked, trying to bend forward and see. But she held
him fast, as, with an effort, she recovered herself.
“The very man we were speaking of,” she answered in a hurried
undertone. “Don’t let him see you. Do we want a third person on our
walk home?”
“Hardly,” Von Tressen laughed, as they slipped back among the thick
underwood. But it was too late, for the Count came down the ride at
a hand gallop and hailed them. His quick eyes had doubtless detected
their presence at the moment Philippa saw him.