A Night on the Moor and Other Tales of Dread Page 11

  ‘I awaken in madness; for the dread that grows in my companionless nights deepens towards morning. Suppose that Flavia had never really loved me;—suppose that I had been only her last dearly-paid-for whim;—suppose,—nay, now I have written it my fears go in laughter. Flavia is the paragon: I alone understand her mystery. Any man less initiated in the secrets of her character might declare that to me her outward demeanour was cold. But I glory in her apparent lack of feeling, conscious that my position is impregnable, and that her passion, though chastened, is still powerful.’

  The white shoulders were shrugged. ‘How lacking in discrimination!’ Before he had written thus she had been absolutely discourteous, whilst he had ever refused to understand. It was her remark, that change is necessary to existence, which had evoked this strange protest. Besides, she knew herself to be inconstant in thought. The hours spent in his company, which at first were almost unearthly in their speed of flight, were dull and wearisome now, and she had grown to hail the time of his departure with something akin to pleasure.

  Six more letters were passed unopened—much less unread. Then she unfolded the last—his reply to her renunciation.

  ‘Flavia, it is hard to think that you of all the world should care to jest with me. That your letter is anything more than a jest I am struggling not to believe. After all your vows, breathed as you lay in my arms, whispered in a tone that made me vibrate like a harp-string, you should not play with my feelings. You know me, darling: it was unkind.

  ‘O God in heaven, I dare not believe it! I will not! I cannot! My mind is not large enough to take in so monstrous a truth!

  ‘We will meet to-morrow in the wood, and laugh together at the frightened fool you have made of me! and in revenge I will be sardonic and cruel.’

  PART III.

  Sloping fir alleys; bounded at one end by a darkly mantled fish-pond, at the other by an open park, with grazing deer and cattle. Birds avoid these fir-woods: this one was silent, save for a low boom of insects and the dwarfish whistling of shrew-mice.

  Ravil was first at the meeting-place. He rested in a cathedral-like vista overarched with olive—the glade where Flavia had sung. The wiry grass was hot with the sun, the air thick with fragrance.

  He waited in gladness. As the time had drawn near much of his dread had vanished, and although he still felt like a man who stands with his back to a pit, on whose verge his heels are pressing, the light beating on his brain so dazzled him that little save the maddest joy was left.

  In the interval he conjured up visions of her beauty: his lips moved as if to kiss. He reviewed for the thousandth time the history of their passion. No false humility had ever troubled him; and despite the worldly distinction between noble and plebeian, he saw himself her equal at all points. In his egotistical belief, the highest patent of nobility should be bestowed on those with unplumbed depths of feeling, with superior capacities for suffering.

  At last she came, not in azure this time, but in a gown of plain russet, such as any of the cottagers’ wives on her land might have worn. But something exquisite in her manner of wearing it showed the gentle rounding of her breasts, the rise and fall of her breathing. A flush spread over her face as he rose to greet her; at the sight the old hunger came, and he bent his head to hers.

  ‘Once,’ she said very faintly.

  There was a note of sublime renunciation in her voice. If she had loved him with all her heart, and had discovered that his future required the breaking of the unlawful bond, she could not have shown a nobler pathos. He flung his arm about her neck, and half-savagely kissed her ripe lips.

  Soon she drew apart. ‘You hurt me,’ she said. ‘There is not much time. . . . I must return soon . . . there are people . . . He . . .’

  He fell back with contorted mouth, for the lash had agonised him with its subtle poison. Pity filled her, and she soothed him with velvet caresses, tried to flatter him with hopes of fame. ’Twould be best for him; in after years they would meet, he jubilant with men’s praise, she saddened and broken in by the legal bond. For his sake, all for his sake.

  When he had recovered somewhat he strove to discover the truth in her eyes. It was a profitless task.

  His chin began to tremble. ‘Here are the letters,’ he whispered huskily. ‘Keep mine. . . . Leave me here. . . . Good-bye.’

  Flavia went weeping away. Ere she had walked a mile a sudden thrill shook her from head to foot, and she sank down to the grass. A wonderful light shone from her face. Life’s greatness was upon her: her lover’s child had stirred within her body.

  Born of womanly ecstasy, born of the pain of parting, love that before had been a sickly dwarf, sprang up a ruddy giant. O the bliss, the tenfold bliss of passion revived!

  She hurried to the place where she had left him, wild to pant out her secret on his breast. He was there still, but white and rigid, and with a purple wound in his temple.

  Witch-In-Grain

  Of late Michal had been much engrossed in the reading of the black-letter books that Philosopher Bale brought from France. As you know I am no Latinist—though one while she was earnest in her desire to instruct me; but the open air had ever greater charms for me than had the dry precincts of a library. So I grudged the time she spent apart, and throughout the spring I would have been all day at her side, talking such foolery as lovers use. But ever she must steal away and hide, herself amongst dead volumes.

  Yestereven I crossed the Roods, and entered the garden, to find the girl sitting under a yew-tree. Her face was haggard and her eyes sunken: for the time it seemed as if many years had passed over her head, but somehow the change had only added to her beauty. And I marvelled greatly, but ere I could speak a huge bird, whose plumage was as the brightest gold, fluttered out of her lap from under the silken apron; and looking on her uncovered bosom I saw that his beak had pierced her tender flesh.

  I cried aloud, and would have caught the thing, but it rose slowly, laughing like a man, and, beating upwards, passed out of sight in the quincunx. Then Michal drew long breaths, and her youth came back in some measure. But she frowned, and said, ‘What is it, sweetheart? Why hast awakened me? I dreamed that I fed the Dragon of the Hesperidean Garden.’ Meanwhile, her gaze set on the place whither the bird had flown.

  ‘Thou hast chosen a filthy mammet,’ I said. ‘Tell me how came it hither?’

  She rose without reply, and kissed her hands to the gaudy wings, which were nearing through the trees. Then, lifting up a great tome that had lain at her feet, she turned towards the house. But ere she had reached the end of the maze she stopped, and smiled with strange subtlety.

  ‘How camest thou hither, O satyr?’ she cried. ‘Even when the Dragon slept, and the fruit hung naked to my touch. . . . . The gates fell to.’

  Perplexed and sore adread, I followed to the hall; and found in the herb garden the men struggling with an ancient woman—a foul crone, brown and puckered as a rotten costard. At sight of Michal she thrust out her hands, crying, ‘Save me, mistress!’ The girl cowered, and ran up the perron and indoors. But for me, I questioned Simon, who stood well out of reach of the wretch’s nails, as to the wherefore of this hurly-burly.

  His underlings bound the runnion with cords, and haled her to the closet in the banqueting gallery. Then, her beldering being stilled, Simon entreated me to compel Michal to prick her arm. So I went down to the library, and found my sweetheart sitting by the window, tranced with seeing that goblin fowl go tumbling on the lawn.

  My heart was full of terror and anguish. ‘Dearest Michal,’ I prayed, ‘for the sake of our passion let me command. Here is a knife.’ I took a poniard from Sir Roger’s stand of arms. ‘Come with me now; I will tell you all.’

  Her gaze still shed her heart upon the popinjay; and when I took her hand and drew her from the room, she strove hard to escape. In the gallery I pressed her fingers round the haft, and knowing that the witch was bound, flung open the door so that they faced each other. But Mother Benmusk’s eyes glared
like fire, so that Michal was withered up, and sank swooning into my arms. And a chuckle of disdain leaped from the hag’s ragged lips. Simon and the others came hurrying, and when Michal had found her life, we begged her to cut into one of those knotted arms. Yet she would none of it, but turned her face and signed no—no—she would not. And as we strove to prevail with her, word came that one of the Bishop’s horses had cast a shoe in the village, and that his lordship craved the hospitality of Ford, until the smith had mended the mishap. Nigh at the heels of his message came the divine, and having heard and pondered our tale, he would fain speak with her.

  I took her to the withdrawing-room, where at the sight of him she burst into such a loud fit of laughter that the old man rose in fear and went away.

  ‘Surely it is an obsession,’ he cried; ‘nought can be done until the witch takes back her spells!’

  So I bade the servants carry Benmusk to the mere, and cast her in the muddy part thereof where her head would lie above water. That was fifteen hours ago, but methinks I still hear her screams clanging through the stagnant air. Never was hag so fierce and full of strength! All along the garden I saw a track of uprooted flowers. Amongst the sedges the turmoil grew and grew till every heron fled. They threw her in, and the whole mere seethed as if the floor of it were hell. For full an hour she cursed us fearsomely: then, finding that every time she neared the land the men thrust her back again, her spirit waxed abject, and she fell to whimpering.

  Two hours before twelve she cried that she would tell all she knew. So we landed her, and she was loosened of her bonds and she mumbled in my ear: ‘I swear by Satan that I am innocent of this harm! I ha’ none but pawtry secrets. Go at midnight to the lows and watch Baldus’s tomb. There thou shalt find all.’

  The beldam tottered away, her bemired petticoats clapping her legs; and I bade them let her rest in peace until I had certainly proved her guilt. With this I returned to the house; but, finding that Michal had retired for the night, I sat by the fire, waiting for the time to pass. A clock struck the half before eleven, and I set out for King Baldus’s grave, whither, had not such a great matter been at stake, I dared not have ventured after dark. I stole from the garden and through the first copse. The moon lay against a brazen curtain; little snail-like clouds were crawling underneath, and the horns of them pricked her face.

  As I neared the lane to the waste, a most unholy dawn broke behind the fringe of pines, looping the boles with strings of grey-golden light. Surely a figure moved there?

  I ran. A curious motley and a noisy swarmed forth at me. Another moment, and I was in the midst of a host of weasels and hares and such-like creatures, all flying from the precincts of the tomb. I quaked with dread, and the hair of my flesh stood upright. But I thrust on, and parted the thorn boughs, and looked up at the mound.

  On the summit thereof sat Michal, triumphing, invested with flames. And the Shape approached, and wrapped her in his blackness.

  The Basilisk

  Marina gave no sign that she heard my protestation. The embroidery of Venus’s hands in her silk picture of The Judgment of Paris was seemingly of greater import to her than the love which almost tore my soul and body asunder. In absolute despair I sat until she had replenished her needle seven times. Then impassioned nature cried aloud:—

  ‘You do not love me!’

  She looked up somewhat wearily, as one debarred from rest. ‘Listen,’ she said. ‘There is a creature called a Basilisk, which turns men and women into stone. In my girlhood I saw the Basilisk—I am stone!’

  And, rising from her chair, she departed the room, leaving me in amazed doubt as to whether I had heard aright. I had always known of some curious secret in her life: a secret which permitted her to speak of and to understand things to which no other woman had dared to lift her thoughts. But alas! it was a secret whose influence ever thrust her back from the attaining of happiness. She would warm, then freeze instantly; discuss the purest wisdom, then cease with contemptuous lips and eyes. Doubtless this strangeness had been the first thing to awaken my passion. Her beauty was not of the kind that smites men with sudden craving: it was pale and reposeful, the loveliness of a marble image. Yet, as time went on, so wondrous became her fascination that even the murmur of her swaying garments sickened me with longing. Not more than a year had passed since our first meeting, when I had found her laden with flaming tendrils in the thinned woods of my heritage. A very Dryad, robed in grass colour, she was chanting to the sylvan deities. The invisible web took me, and I became her slave.

  Her house lay two leagues from mine. It was a low-built mansion lying in a concave park. The thatch was gaudy with stonecrop and lichen. Amongst the central chimneys a foreign bird sat on a nest of twigs. The long windows blazed with heraldic devices; and paintings of kings and queens and nobles hung in the dim chambers. Here she dwelt with a retinue of aged servants, fantastic women and men half imbecile, who salaamed before her with eastern humility and yet addressed her in such terms as gossips use. Had she given them life they could not have obeyed with more reverence. Quaint things the women wrought for her—pomanders and cushions of thistledown; and the men were never happier than when they could tell her of the first thrush’s egg in the thornbush or the sege of bitterns that haunted the marsh. She was their goddess and their daughter. Each day had its own routine. In the morning she rode and sang and played; at noon she read in the dusty library, drinking to the full of the dramatists and the platonists. Her own life was such a tragedy as an Elizabethan would have adored. None save her people knew her history, but there were wonderful stories of how she had bowed to tradition, and concentrated in herself the characteristics of a thousand wizard fathers. In the blossom of her youth she had sought strange knowledge, and had tasted thereof, and rued.

  The morning after my declaration she rode across her park to the meditating walk I always paced till noon. She was alone, dressed in a habit of white lutestring with a loose girdle of blue. As her mare reached the yew hedge, she dismounted, and came to me with more lightness than I had ever beheld in her. At her waist hung a black glass mirror, and her half-bare arms were adorned with cabalistic jewels.

  When I knelt to kiss her hand, she sighed heavily. ‘Ask me nothing,’ she said. ‘Life itself is too joyless to be more embittered by explanations. Let all rest between us as now. I will love coldly, you warmly, with no nearer approaching.’ Her voice rang full of a wistful expectancy: as if she knew that I should combat her half-explained decision. She read me well, for almost ere she had done I cried out loudly against it:—‘It can never be so—I cannot breathe—I shall die?’

  She sank to the low moss-covered wall. ‘Must the sacrifice be made?’ she asked, half to herself. ‘Must I tell him all?’ Silence prevailed a while, then turning away her face she said: ‘From the first I loved you, but last night in the darkness, when I could not sleep for thinking of your words, love sprang into desire.’

  I was forbidden to speak.

  ‘And desire seemed to burst the cords that bound me. In that moment’s strength I felt that I could give all for the joy of being once utterly yours.’

  I longed to clasp her to my heart. But her eyes were stern, and a frown crossed her brow.

  ‘At morning light,’ she said, ‘desire died, but in my ecstasy I had sworn to give what must be given for that short bliss, and to lie in your arms and pant against you before another midnight. So I have come to bid you fare with me to the place where the spell may be loosed, and happiness bought.’

  She called the mare: it came whinnying, and pawed the ground until she had stroked its neck. She mounted, setting in my hand a tiny, satin-shod foot that seemed rather child’s than woman’s. ‘Let us go together to my house,’ she said. ‘I have orders to give and duties to fulfil. I will not keep you there long, for we must start soon on our errand.’ I walked exultantly at her side, but, the grange in view, I entreated her to speak explicitly of our mysterious journey. She stooped and patted my head. ‘’Tis but a
matter of buying and selling,’ she answered.

  When she had arranged her household affairs, she came to the library and bade me follow her. Then, with the mirror still swinging against her knees, she led me through the garden and the wilderness down to a misty wood. It being autumn, the trees were tinted gloriously in dusky bars of colouring. The rowan, with his amber leaves and scarlet berries, stood before the brown black-spotted sycamore; the silver beech flaunted his golden coins against my poverty; firs, green and fawn-hued, slumbered in hazy gossamer. No bird carolled, although the sun was hot. Marina noted the absence of sound, and without prelude of any kind began to sing from the ballad of the Witch Mother: about the nine enchanted knots, and the trouble-comb in the lady’s knotted hair, and the master-kid that ran beneath her couch. Every drop of my blood froze in dread, for whilst she sang her face took on the majesty of one who traffics with infernal powers. As the shade of the trees fell over her, and we passed intermittently out of the light, I saw that her eyes glittered like rings of sapphires. Believing now that the ordeal she must undergo would be too frightful, I begged her to return. Supplicating on my knees—‘Let me face the evil alone!’ I said, ‘I will entreat the loosening of the bonds. I will compel and accept any penalty.’ She grew calm. ‘Nay,’ she said, very gently, ‘if aught can conquer, it is my love alone. In the fervour of my last wish I can dare everything.’

  By now, at the end of a sloping alley, we had reached the shores of a vast marsh. Some unknown quality in the sparkling water had stained its whole bed a bright yellow. Green leaves, of such a sour brightness as almost poisoned to behold, floated on the surface of the rush-girdled pools. Weeds like tempting veils of mossy velvet grew beneath in vivid contrast with the soil. Alders and willows hung over the margin. From where we stood a half-submerged path of rough stones, threaded by deep swift channels, crossed to the very centre. Marina put her foot upon the first step. ‘I must go first,’ she said. ‘Only once before have I gone this way, yet I know its pitfalls better than any living creature.’