by E. F. Benson
The boy had been utterly bewildered. What were they playing at, he wondered. Was it charades of some sort? There was Barton, his face solemn and eager, raising his left hand as if in blessing: more astonishing was his uncle, licking his lips and swallowing in his throat, as if his mouth watered. There was something below all this dressing-up, which meant nothing to him, but had some hidden significance for the two men. It was uncomfortable: it disquieted him, and he wouldn’t kneel, but disrobed himself of the cotta and cassock. ‘I don’t know what it’s about,’ he said: and again, as between Judith and her mother, he saw question and answer pass between them. Somehow his lack of interest had disappointed them, but he felt no interest at all: just a vague repulsion.
The diversions of the day were renewed: there was more tennis and bathing, but they all seemed to have lost the edge of their keenness about him. That evening he was dressed rather earlier than the others, and was sitting in a deep window-seat of the drawing-room, reading the book Mrs Ray had lent him. He was not getting on with it; it was puzzling, and the French was difficult: he thought he would return it to her, saying that it was beyond him. Just then she and his uncle entered: they were talking together, and did not perceive him.
‘No, it’s no use, Isabel,’ said his uncle. ‘He’s got no curiosity, no leanings: it would only disgust him and put him off. That’s not the way to win souls. Owen thinks so, too. And he’s too innocent: why when I was his age . . . Why, there’s Francis. What’s the boy reading? Ah, I see! What do you make of it?’
Francis closed the book.
‘I give it up,’ he said. ‘I can’t get on with it.’
Mrs Ray laughed. ‘I agree, too, Horace,’ she said. ‘But what a pity!’
Somehow Francis got the impression, he remembered, that they had been talking about him. But, if so, what was it for which he had no leanings?’
He had gone to bed rather early that night, encouraged, he thought, to do so, leaving the rest at a game of bridge. He soon slept, but awoke, thinking he heard the sound of chanting. Then came three strokes of a bell, and a pause and three more. He was too sleepy to care what it was about.
Such, as the train rushed through the night, was the sum of his impressions about his visit to the man whose substance he had now inherited, subject to the charge of £500 a year to the Reverend Owen Barton. He was astonished to find how vivid and how vaguely disquieting were these memories, which now for four years had been buried in his mind. As he sank into sounder sleep they faded again, and he thought little more of them in the morning.
He went to see Mr Angus as soon as he got to London. Certain securities would have to be sold in order to pay death duties, but the administration of the estate was a simple matter. Francis wanted to know more about his benefactor, but Mr Angus could tell him very little. Horace Elton had, for some years, lived an extremely sequestered life down at Wedderburn, and his only intimate associate was his secretary, this Mr Owen Barton. Beyond him, there were two ladies who used often to stay with him for long periods. Their names? – and he paused, searching his memory.
‘Mrs Isabel Ray and her daughter Judith?’ suggested Francis.
‘Exactly. They were often there. And, not infrequently, a number of people used to arrive rather late in the evening, eleven o’clock or even later, stay for an hour or two and then be off again. A little mysterious. Only a week or so before Mr Elton died, there had been quite a congregation of them, fifteen or twenty, I believe.’
Francis was silent for a moment: it was as if pieces of jig-saw puzzle were calling for their due location. But their shapes were too fantastic . . .
‘And about my uncle’s illness and death,’ he said. ‘The cremation of his body was on the same day as that on which he died; at least so I understood from your telegram.’
‘Yes: that was so,’ said Mr Angus.
‘But why? I should instantly have come back to England in order to be present. Was it not unusual?’
‘Yes, Mr Elton, it was unusual. But there were reasons for it.’
‘I should like to hear them,’ he said. ‘I was his heir, and it would have been only proper that I should have been there. Why?’
Angus hesitated a moment.
‘That is a reasonable question,’ he said, ‘and I feel bound to answer it. I must begin a little way back . . . Your uncle was in excellent physical health apparently, till about a week before his death. Very stout, but very alert and active. Then the trouble began. It took the form at first of some grievous mental and spiritual disturbance. He thought for some reason that he was going to die very soon, and the idea of death produced in him an abnormal panic terror. He telegraphed for me, for he wanted to make some alteration in his will. I was away and could not get down till the next day, and by the time I arrived he was too desperately ill to give any sort of coherent instructions. But his intention, I think, was to cut Mr Owen Barton out of it.’
Again the lawyer paused.
‘I found,’ he said, ‘that on the morning of the day I got down to Wedderburn, he had sent for the parson of his parish, and had made a confession to him. What that was I have not, of course, the slightest idea. Till then he had been in this panic fear of death, but was physically himself. Immediately afterwards some very horrible disease invaded him. Just that: invasion. The doctors who were summoned from London and Bournemouth had no idea what it was. Some unknown microbe, they supposed, which made the most swift and frightful havoc of skin and tissue and bone. It was like some putrefying internal corruption. It was as if he was dead already . . . Really, I don’t know what good it will do to tell you this.’
‘I want to know,’ said Francis.
‘Well: this corruption. Living organisms came out as from a dead body. His nurses used to be sick. And the room was always swarming with flies; great fat flies, crawling over the walls and the bed. He was quite conscious, and there persisted this frantic terror of death, when you would have thought that a man’s soul would have been only too thankful to be quit of such a habitation.’
‘And was Mr Owen Barton with him?’ asked Francis.
‘From the moment that Mr Elton made his confession, he refused to see him. Once he came into the room, and there was a shocking scene. The dying man screamed and yelled with terror. Nor would he see the two ladies we have mentioned: why they continued to stop in the house I can’t imagine. Then on the last morning of his life – he could not speak now – he traced a word or two on a piece of paper, and it seemed that he wanted to receive the Holy Communion. So the parson was sent for.’
The old lawyer paused again: Francis saw that his hand was shaking.
‘Then very dreadful things happened,’ he said.
‘I was in the room, for he signed to me to be near him, and I saw them with my own eyes. The parson had poured the wine into the chalice and had put the bread on the paten, and was about to consecrate the elements, when a cloud of those flies, of which I have told you, came about him. They filled the chalice like a swarm of bees, they settled in their unclean thousands on the paten, and in a couple of minutes the chalice was dry and empty and they had devoured the bread. Then like drilled hosts, you may say, they swarmed on to your uncle’s face, so that you could see nothing of it. He choked and he gasped: there was one writhing convulsion, and, thank God, it was all over.’
‘And then?’ asked Francis.
‘There were no flies. Nothing. But it was necessary to have the body cremated at once and the bedding with it. Very shocking indeed! I would not have told you, if you had not pressed me.’
‘And the ashes?’ asked he.
‘You will see that there is a clause in his will, directing that his remains should be buried at the foot of the Judas-tree beside the swimming pool in the garden at Wedderburn. That was done.’
Francis was a very unimaginative young man, free from superstitious twitte
rings and unprofitable speculations, and this story, suggestive though it was of ghastly sub-currents, did not take hold of his mind at all or lead to the fashioning of uneasy fancies. It was all very horrible, but it was over. He went down to Wedderburn for Easter with a widowed sister of his and her small boy, aged eleven, and they all fairly fell in love with the place. It was soon settled that Sybil Marsham should let her house in London for the summer months, and establish herself here. Dickie, who was a delicate boy, rather queer and elfin, would thus have the benefit of country air, and Francis the benefit of having the place run by his sister and occupied and in commission whenever he was able to get away from his work.
The house was of brick and timber, with accommodation for half a dozen folk, and stood on high ground above the little town. Francis made a tour of it, as soon as he arrived, rather astonished to find how the sight of it rubbed up to clearness in the minutest details his memory of it. There was the sitting-room with its tall bookcases and its deep window-seats overlooking the garden, where he had sat unobserved when his uncle and Mrs Ray came in talking together. Above was his uncle’s panelled bedroom, which he proposed to occupy himself, with the big wardrobe containing vestments. He opened it: they were under their covering sheets of tissue paper, shimmering with scarlet and gold and finest lawn foamed with Irish lace: a faint smell of incense hung about them. Next to that was his uncle’s sitting-room, and beyond that the room which he had slept in before, and was now appropriated to Dickie. These rooms lay on the front of the house, looking westwards over the garden, and he went out to renew acquaintance with it. Flower-beds gay with spring blossoms ran below the windows: then came the lawn, and beyond the belt of trees that enclosed the swimming pool. He passed along the path that threaded it between tapestries of primrose and anemone, and came out into the clearing that surrounded the water. The bathing shed stood at the deep end of it by the sluice that splashed riotously into the channel below, for the stream that supplied the pool was running full with the rains of March. In front of the copse on the far side stood a Judas-tree decked gloriously with flowers, and the reflection of it was cast waveringly on the rippled surface of the water. Somewhere below those red-blossoming boughs, there was buried a casket of ashes. He strolled round the pool: it was quite sheltered here from the April breeze, and bees were busy in the red blossoms. Bees, and large fat flies, a quantity of them.
He and Sybil were sitting in the drawing-room with the deep window-seats as dusk began to fall. A servant came in to say that Mr Owen Barton had called. Certainly they were at home, and he entered, and was introduced to Sybil.
‘You will hardly remember me, Mr Elton,’ he said, ‘but I was here when you paid a visit to your uncle: four years ago it must have been.’
‘But I remember you perfectly,’ he said. ‘We bathed together, we played tennis: you were very kind to a shy boy. And are you living here still?’
‘Yes: I took a house in Wedderburn after your uncle’s death. I spent six very happy years with him as his secretary, and I got much attached to the country. My house stands just outside your garden palings opposite the latched gate leading into the wood round the pool.’
The door opened and Dickie came in. He caught sight of the stranger and stopped.
‘Say “how do you do” to Mr Barton, Dickie,’ said his mother.
Dickie performed this duty with due politeness and stood regarding him. He was a shy boy usually; but, after this inspection, he advanced close to him, and laid his hands on his knees.
‘I like you,’ he said confidently, and leant up against him.
‘Don’t bother Mr Barton, Dickie,’ she said rather sharply.
‘But indeed he’s doing nothing of the kind,’ said Barton, and he drew the boy towards him so that he stood clipped between his knees.
Sybil got up.
‘Come, Dick,’ she said. ‘We’ll have a walk round the garden before it gets dark.’
‘Is he coming, too?’ asked the boy.
‘No: he’s going to stop and talk to Uncle Francis.’
When the two men were alone Barton said a word or two about Horace Elton, who had always been so generous a friend to him. The end, mercifully short, had been terrible, and terrible to him personally had been the dying man’s refusal to see him during the last two days of his life.
‘His mind, I think, must have been affected,’ he said, ‘by his awful sufferings. It happens like that sometimes: people turn against those with whom they have been most intimate. I have often mourned over that, and deeply regretted it . . . And I owe you certain words of explanation, Mr Elton. No doubt you were puzzled to find in your uncle’s will that I was entitled “the Reverend”. It is quite true, though I do not call myself so. Certain spiritual doubts and difficulties caused me to give up my orders, but your uncle always held that if a man is once a priest he is always a priest. He was very strong about that, and no doubt he was right.’
‘I didn’t know my uncle took any interest in ecclesiastical affairs,’ said Francis. ‘Ah, I had forgotten about his vestments. Perhaps that was only an artistic taste.’
‘By no means. He regarded them as sacred things, consecrated to holy uses. . . . And may I ask you what happened to his remains? I remember he once expressed a wish to be buried by the swimming pool.’
‘His body was cremated,’ said Francis, ‘and the ashes were buried there.’
Barton stayed but little longer, and Sybil on her return was frankly relieved to find he had gone. Simply, she didn’t like him. There was something queer, something sinister about him. Francis laughed at her: quite a good fellow, he thought.
Dreams, of course, are a mere hash-up of recent mental images and associations, and a very vivid dream that came to Francis that night could easily have arisen from such topics. He thought he was swimming in the bathing pool with Owen Barton, and that his uncle, stout and florid, was standing underneath the Judas-tree watching them. That seemed quite natural, as is the way of dreams: merely he was not dead at all. When they came out of the water, he looked for his clothes, but found that there was laid out for him a scarlet cassock and a white lace-trimmed cotta. This again was quite natural; so, too, was the fact that Barton put on a gold cope.
His uncle, very merry and licking his lips, joined them, and each of them took an arm of his and they walked back to the house together singing a hymn. As they went the daylight died, and by the time they crossed the lawn it was black night, and the windows of the house were lit. They walked upstairs, still singing, into his uncle’s bedroom which was now his own. There was an open door, which he had never noticed before opposite his bed, and there came a very bright light from it. Then the sense of nightmare began, for his two companions, gripping him tightly, pulled him along towards it, and he struggled with them knowing there was something terrible within. But step by step they dragged him, violently resisting, and now out of the door there came a swarm of large fat flies that buzzed and settled on him. Thicker and thicker they streamed out, covering his face, and crawling into his eyes, and entering his mouth as he panted for breath. The horror grew to breaking-point, and he woke sweating with a hammering heart. He switched on the light, and there was the quiet room and the dawn beginning to be luminous outside, and the birds just tuning up.
Francis’s few days of holiday passed quickly. He went down to the village to see Barton’s house, and found it a most pleasant little dwelling, and its owner an exceedingly pleasant fellow. Barton dined with them one evening, and Sybil went so far as to admit that her first judgment of him was hasty. He was charming with Dickie, too, and that disposed her in his favour, and the boy adored him. Soon it was necessary to find some tutor for him, and Barton readily agreed to undertake his education, and every morning Dickie trotted across the garden and through the wood where the swimming pool lay to Barton’s house. His ill-health had made him rather backward in his studies, but he wa
s now eager to learn and to please his instructor, and he got on quickly.
It was now that I first met Francis, and during the next few months in London we became close friends. He told me that he had lately inherited this place at Wedderburn from his uncle, but for the present I knew no more than that of the previous history which I have just recorded. Sometime during July he told me he was intending to spend the month of August there. His sister, who kept house for him, and her small boy would be away for the first week or two, for she had taken him off to the seaside. Would I then come and share his solitude, and get on there, uninterrupted, with some work I had on hand. That seemed a very attractive plan, and we motored down together one very hot afternoon early in August, that promised thunder. Owen Barton, he told me, who had been his uncle’s secretary was coming to dine with us that night.
It wanted an hour or so yet to dinner-time when we arrived, and Francis directed me, if I cared for a dip, to the bathing pool among the trees beyond the lawn. He had various household businesses to look into himself, so I went off alone. It was an enchanting place, the water still and very clear, mirroring the sky and the full-foliaged trees, and I stripped and plunged in. I lay and floated in the cool water, I swam and dived again, and then I saw, walking close to the far bank of the pool, a man of something more than middle-age, and extremely stout. He was in dress clothes, dinner-jacket and black tie, and instantly it struck me that this must be Mr Barton coming up from the village to dine with us. It must therefore be later than I thought, and I swam back to the shed where my clothes were. As I climbed out of the water, I glanced round. There was no one there.
It was a slight shock, but very slight. It was odd that he should have come so unexpectedly out of the wood and disappeared again so suddenly, but it did not concern me much. I hurried home, changed quickly and came down, expecting to find Francis and his guest in the drawing-room. But I need not have been in such haste for now my watch told me that there was still a quarter of an hour before dinner-time. As for the others, I supposed that Mr Barton was upstairs with Francis in his sitting-room. So I picked up a chance book to beguile the time, and read for a while, but the room grew rather dark, and, rising to switch on the electric light, I saw standing outside the French window into the garden the figure of a man, outlined against the last of a stormy sunset, looking into the room.