At noon on a certain Thursday, seven days after his arrival, the
Duke of Dorset set out to shoot quail in the river bottom south of the
château. A shower of rain had fallen in the morning. The air was clear
and bright. The mountains gleamed as in a mirror, the haze, by some
optical illusion, banked behind them. The vigor of spring, by some trick
of Nature, seemed to have crept back into the earth; to swim in the dark
waters of the river; to lie at the root of the grasses; to swell under
the bark of the fir tree, waiting for a day or two of sun. The great
principle of life, waning in the autumn, seemed moving, potent, on the
point of recovering its vitality, as under some April shower. Birds
fluttered in the thickets, as though seized with a nesting instinct; the
cattle wandered in their pasture; new blades started green at the
roots of the brown turf; and, now and then, as though misled, as though
tricked, a little flower opened to the sun.
The man, walking through the fields, the meadows, over the moist leaves,
received, like every other thing, his share of this subtle influence.
The clean air whipped his blood; that virility, warming in the grasses,
in the green stem of the flower, under the bark of the fir tree, warmed,
too, in every fiber of his body.
He walked on, following the high bank of the river, forgetting the red
setter at his heels, the gun tucked under his arm. Quail got up and
whirred to distant thickets, the woodcock arose from some corner of the
swamp, but the gun remained under the cover of his arm. He felt somehow,
on this afternoon, a certain sympathy with these little people of the
fields--with the robin and his brown lady. Under what principle of
selection had they mated? What trick of manner had favored this dapper
gallant? What thing of special beauty had set this thicket belle, in his
eye, above her rivals? The riddle, as he turned it, lifted to a broader
application.
Was not that mystery a thing hidden as no other mystery moving in this
world is hidden? When the King Cophetua caught up the beggar maid for
queen, could he give a reason for it? Was it the blue eye that did it,
or the red mouth? Other eyes were blue, other mouths, in his court, were
red. Did he know any better what it was than this brown fellow in his
tree top? Did one ever know? Did any living thing, since the world began
its spinning, know?
Imperceptibly, creeping like some opiate, the mystery of it occupied the
Duke's fancy. He returned to the picture on the stair; to the girl in
Oban. What was it that his blood had caught? What thing was it that
set this woman above every other in the world? Why was it that the mere
memory of her voice set the nerves under his skin to tingling? Why was
it that a hunger for her spread through him, as though every fiber had a
mouth that starved? Had he stood up to be shot against a wall, there, in
the sun, he could not have answered.
He traveled for miles south along the river, in this autumn afternoon,
idly, his gun under his arm, until the trail ended at the bend of the
river, where the black waters swing about a moment, before plunging over
a mile of rapids seaward through the mountains. Here the red Indian,
whose trail he followed, used once to cross, swimming with a long
stroke of his right arm, and holding his weapon over his head that the
bowstring might be dry. A fir, uprooted by the winds, lay with its top
buried in the pool, its brown body warm, mottled with the sun.
The Duke of Dorset sat down on this tree, his back against a limb.
And Nature, that great enchantress, that subtle guardian of life, that
divine fakir, squatting on her carpet in the sun, tempted him with
pictures of vivid, intoxicating detail; whispered and suggested,
stretching her lures, cunning as a spider, across the door posts of
every sense. The leaves, falling on his face, were soft hands that
touched him, the birds, laughing in the thickets, were a human voice
that laughed, the rustle of their wings were skirts trailing on a
carpet.
The day waned. The sun grew thinner northward on the fields. The blue
haze gathered in the pockets of the mountains, as though, like smoke, it
seeped upward through the earth. A cooler air attended. An owl, sleeping
in the green top of a fir tree across the river, troubled by some dream,
lurched forward, lost his footing on the brown limb, awoke, and flapped,
without a sound, eastward to a thicker tree top. The Duke of Dorset,
sitting with the gun across his knees, caught the shadow traveling on
the water, turned where he sat, and brought the gun up to his shoulder.
A moment the blue barrels followed the outlaw, then his finger pressed
the trigger, and that pirate had gone out no more on his robbing raids,
but fate, moving to another purpose, saved him; the gun snapped; the
Duke's finger instantly caught the second trigger, but that snapped,
like the first, with a faint click. He brought the gun down, threw open
the breech, and replaced the cartridges, but the outlaw was housed now
safely in his distant tree top. The Duke of Dorset got down from his
place, and turned the gun on a patch of lichen, set like a silver target
against a black rock emerging from the river, but the triggers clicked
again.
He broke the gun and looked carefully at the shells. There was no dent
on the caps, one was wholly untouched, the other scratched faintly. He
opened and closed the breech slowly to observe if the cocking mechanism
were defective. The resistance, the sobbing cluck of it, showed no
difficulty there. Then he drew out the shells and raised the gun butt
so the strikers would fall forward, but they did not fall into sight.
He struck the butt with his hand to loosen these pins, if they were
sticking, but they remained even with the face of the breech action. He
sprung the hammers on the strikers and still they came no farther into
the breech. The difficulty was obscure, the strikers were loose in their
beds, the hammers working, the gun had been perfect until to-day. He
began to examine the nose of the strikers, and the explanation showed
on the hard steel; both had been filed off smooth with the face of the
breech action. The ends of the strikers were blunt and square. He
could easily see the mark of the file on each one of them. The gun was
useless. The discovery was so extraordinary that the man did not seek a
theory to fit it. It was useless to speculate. He would inquire of the
servant on his return.
The Duke followed the river to the park east of the château. Here the
road crossed on a single stone span rising gracefully over the black
water. A low wall, no higher than a man's knee, inclosed the road over
the long arch. Beyond was the forest, changing under the descending
light from blue to purple, from purple into blackness--all forest, from
the bridge end to the distant tree-laced sky line. Westward the park
lifted to the château--a park like those to be found in England; forest
trees standing in no order, the undergrowth removed, and the earth
carpeted with grass. At the summit, to be seen in among the gray tree
tops, the dull yellow walls of the château loomed. The river, caught
here in a narrow channel, boiled and roared, as though maddened by the
insolence of that arch lifted over it for the human foot.
As the Duke approached he saw two men standing in the border of the
forest beyond this bridge, talking together; a moment later one crossed
the bridge and climbed the park to the château. The Duke, coming up the
trail, observed that this man was a footman, in the livery of the house.
The other, who remained by the roadside, looking after him, was the idle
Japanese. He watched the footman until he disappeared among the trees,
then he turned into the forest, a moment before the Duke of Dorset came
up by the corner of the bridge into the park.
The incident recalled to the Duke his previous knowledge of this
Japanese and with it an explanation. The man was, doubtless, a relative
of some servant in the house; the father, perhaps the uncle, of this
footman, and he came here for the flotsam about a country house which
the footman could dispose of. It was a custom old as the oriental
servant; there was always the family to benefit by the servant's
fortune, and one going between surreptitiously with his basket. The
incident and the explanation of it passed through the man's mind like
any casual observation--as one notes and sees the reason of a hundred
trivial matters, without comment, in a day.
The Duke crossed the road and turned up the hill through the park.
The sun was gone now, and a hundred lights peeped through the trees,
blinking from the windows of the house, as though all of its apartments
were in use. At the door, as he was about to speak of the disabled
gun, a valet attending brought him a message that swept so trivial
an incident wholly out of his mind. Miss Childers and the party had
returned. Would His Grace dress a little earlier for dinner.
The Duke of Dorset had been waiting for these words, endless day after
day, and yet, now that they were spoken, he felt like one taken wholly
by surprise; like one called out of his bed to face some difficult
emergency, for which he needed time.