by Frank Norris
His first thought now was to conceal the body. He looked about him. He was in the heart of one of those New Forests which his most dread lord, Wilhelmus Conquestor, Dei Gratiae Rex Anglicorum, following in the footsteps of his Norman ancestry, was at that moment planting throughout conquered England. The growth of the great oaks, pines, and sycamores was too slow to suit the royal patience and pleasure, and the commissioners charged with the forest extension had been commanded to take up trees of sufficient size from other parts of the island and to transplant the same to those tracts set aside for the kingly hunting grounds. Not far from the spot on which Amelot stood, one of these trees, a mighty black pine, lay upon rollers where it had been dragged by the foresters, and on account of the lateness of that day left to be erected upon the next. Close to where its roots, like enormous tentacles, writhed themselves helplessly into the air had been excavated the circular hole which was to receive them. It was a pit; to Amelot’s eyes a grave — a grave for Yéres. Beneath that gigantic trunk what possibility of the body’s recovery? Never a grave more closely guarded, never a monument more securely immutable.
The shovels and mattocks of the serfs lay about upon the dirt heaps. He swung himself into the hole, and with them dug to the depth of six or eight feet. “A pit within a pit,” he said, smiling, “a secret hid within another.”
When he had excavated to what he deemed sufficient extent, he rolled up Yéres in his chappe and slid him into the hole, face downward; but life was not yet wholly quenched; one of those strange after spasms seized upon the body, a muffled sound came from the folds of the chaperon, where the face lay pressed against the earth. The whole form twisted itself over upon its back, the cloak was drawn from the mouth, and, as though terrified at the first touch of the great reclaiming mother, from behind the black lips and clenched teeth there burst a dreadful cry. With a movement quick as the impulse which originated it, Amelot set his foot upon the mouth and shot his glance down the glooming vistas of the forest trunks, and strained his ears to catch any possible answering sigh or sound of succour; but the cry was without response, and he finished the interment without further interruption. He stamped the earth down over the new grave, raked into a pile and burned such leaves as were stained with a red that was not of the autumn, cast his eyes about him, then, in a sudden panic, fled terror-stricken from the spot.
The next day the serfs of Taillebois planted the Black Pine in its destined position, where it grew and thrived for fifteen years.
It was raining in the New Forest.
Rain upon the sea, upon an Irish peat moor, in a Scotch posting house, or in a new town in western Kansas, is bleak and desolate enough, but for the very nadir of depression the ultimate quintessence of dreariness look to a rainy forest at the close of an autumn afternoon, when the drops drum, drum, drum with incessant monotone upon every shaking leaf, when the green mosses and tree-lichens grow big and spongy with wet, and the thick bark of the larger trunks turns black with the water and swells to the consistency of muck, when every tiny, rattling cataract of rain finds its way into nethermost corners of the undergrowth and wakes up the drowsy woodland odours asleep between the layers of dead and fallen leaves; odours which, like heavy incense for dead and dying nature, steam upward into the silent air, when everything is quiet and hushed, when the robins sit voiceless on each secluded bough, fluffing out their feathers, making themselves larger, dozing with their beaks upon their breasts; when the hart, the boar, and the rabbit, and all the myriad insect life, are drowsing in their farthest corners, and all is very quiet, while the drumming of the rain, in endless minor cadence, unceasingly goes on.
So in that dreamy Twelfth Century forest the gentle rain purred on all day in dull and muffled cadence, and in the failing light of the afternoon the wind came softly stealing up.
But with the latest twilight there came a sudden change. A sharp puff of western wind in an instant dissipated all the lonesome quiet which since dawn had reigned supreme. The rain ceased, and a great voice passed among the higher foliage, whispering “sh-sh-sh,” after which the trees stood upright, silent, and, as it were, expectant, listening for the storm that was to come.
It came. In the utter stillness following upon the first heralding gust could be heard, seemingly, unfathomably below the line of the far horizon, the bell-toned ripple of the distant thunder; then the swish and roar of the rain sweeping the uplands, and at intervals, like the opening and closing of a great eye, came the dull and distant glare of the lightning; all as yet so far away.
But it was getting nearer. With a deafening grating, as of the crash and grind of chaotic worlds, the thunder slid upward toward the zenith; like the zigzag course of some Devil-driven spirit, the lightning shot across the gloom, while with a roar, drowned only by the thunderpeals, the rain rushed down upon all frightened nature. The wind lashed across the open spaces between the trees and over their plunging crests, whipping the forest till, as though racked with pain, it groaned and growled again, tearing up the fallen leaves from the ground and sending them whirling and scurrying about like excited rabbits. Simultaneously all the elements were loosed; tortured antics and violent action rudely usurped the so-recent dreamy repose, and the silence and solitude were broken by all the clash and jar of the tempest. A bad night. For those travellers coming eastward from over the old Watling Street, journeying downward to the Surrey lands, a bad night, indeed.
Of such in this wild October storm Amelot found himself the only representative. As he reined in his tired, fretful Flammand upon the broad grooved flagging of the Watling Street, in which his reversed reflection was beginning to form, he considered that a bypath leading to the castle, or rather manor, of Taillebois was, in those days when he was a guest in it, wont to turn off not far from the spot upon which his Flammand’s feet were then so restlessly shifting and stamping. He should know the country well; fifteen years ago, before the extension of the New Forest and the establishment of the forest laws, he had flown his hawk and lain his hounds in these very glades. It was hereabouts his early life had been passed; along that path he had ridden in gambison and lorica to meet Norman William and to fight and flee at Hastings. It was here he had first known Yéres. It was here — By St. Guthlac, enough of that! He crossed himself devoutly. Let the past guard well its own secrets; pilgrimages and offerings would atone.
With little difficulty he found the familiar path, and leading his horse by the bridle entered into the wildly tossing forest on foot. The storm was now at its height, and it was only by the closest scrutiny and surest footing that he managed to follow the devious windings of the trail. On a sudden the tempest rose to hurricane pitch, crash following flash with the regularity and ferocity of a cannonade; his horse pivoted about on his haunches and, shaking free his head, plunged back into the underbrush, hollowest noises raged in the dark upper spaces of the air and were reverberated along the darker cavernous aisles of the tree trunks; the rain became a cataract, the wind a tornado. Battered against the quivering trunks and slippery stones he struggled on until, dazed, drenched, and benumbed, he stumbled into a roughly circular opening amid the trees, where either by nature or design the brush had been cleared away for a radius of about fifty feet.
By the light afforded by the well-nigh incessant blaze of the lightning the place seemed strangely familiar to him, but the turmoil of external nature had so confused his mind that he could form no particular recollection of it save that its sight brought with it associations of fear, flight, and aversion. Then, with the suddenness and vividness of one of the flashes that illumined the spot, the tragedy that had been enacted upon it recurred to his mind. He saw Yéres rolling about in his death throes, saw him suddenly stiffen under his “misericordia” and, as another person, saw him drag the body to the place where the Black Pine was to be erected. Instinctively his eyes followed the direction of his course in his mental vision. Yes, there it stood, the same great forest giant, but now, as he gazed, an indefinable feeling of awe mingled w
ith dread seized upon him. The Pine seemed as if endowed with some unearthly personality, with something that was almost human, or a great deal more. To his mind, the great black mass of clustering boughs threateningly frowned down upon him so far below them. It alone of all its neighbours seemed to stand upright and immovable amid the surrounding confusion. Its tapering crest pointed heavenward in silent reproach, and to that heaven’s tribunal the down-reaching branches, crooked and gnarled like fingers, beckoned him. Terrified, he turned to fly, but a sight still more terrible held him to the spot; simultaneous with the flash came the thunder burst, there was a deafening crack, a spiral of white fire ran down the Pine’s trunk, shearing away the branches, whirling off the bark in clouds of scattering fuzz and lint, and, with a shower of spattering mud, plunged into the earth at its roots. Then, with a speechless terror, he saw that the mighty Pine, struck by lightning and propelled by the force of the wind, had begun to sway. Powerless to stir he watched it gradually moving; about its base the earth stirred and cracked open; slowly, slowly the forest monarch, ninety feet from base to crest, commenced to bend, and then, with ever-increasing impetus, inclined toward the earth. The gigantic shadow beetled, some sixty feet, directly over his head. He saw it coming, coming with a swiftness and with a force that fed itself upon each lessening second, yet he could not move hand, nor eye, nor foot. Ten feet away lay life and all its possibilities, yet he knew himself as certainly doomed as though the hemp were about his throat. All along the trunk ran a fierce snapping and rending noise, and now, as every fibre was strained to its uttermost limit of tension, collectively, like the tightly drawn cords of some huge viol, they gave forth a strident, high-keyed groan, the death cry of the falling Pine which, swelling by quick degrees to a wild monotonous pitch, seemed to merge into almost a human intonation. Hark! where had he heard that cry before? A cry, long, shrill, piercing, and fraught with the accents of deadly suffering and despair. Where? Oh, dreadful thought, where but upon this very spot? The wild, unearthly sound that filled his ears was but the echo, long delayed, of that voice that fifteen years ago had rung unheeded and unheard through those same wooden solitudes. And even as he listened the blow fell. In an instant he was blinded, crushed, stunned, beaten down to the ground, and with Titanic force driven and dinted into the soil, while the roots of the avenging Pine, torn from their earthly bed, heaved themselves high into the air and, enfolded in their thousand, handlike tentacles, shook aloft, as though in defiance of mortal precaution, the bleached and mouldering bones of a clattering skeleton!
The next day the Sire de Taillebois, hunting the deer by royal permit, and led by the strange behaviour of the pack, which, swerving from the trail of a wounded sounder, had brought up baying and excited about an open space in the forest, found the dead and the dying entangled in the roots and branches of the great Black Pine. The unknown skeleton was interred near by, a cairn and a woodland shrine were shortly after erected over the spot, and the strange incident became one of the family legends of the Taillebois. The broken yet living body of Amelot, recognized by the Sire de Taillebois, was taken to the Manor. It was remarked by those who removed him from the tangled mass of broken and interlacing boughs that they exuded a thick and slimy sap, of a peculiar reddish tinge, unpleasant to the touch and particularly horrible to the sight.
Not many days after came woodcutters with ax and ox to the place where the Black Pine had fallen. “Pity,” said they, “that so fine a tree should be left to rot to powder; trim its spreading branches, saw it into lengths and dispose of them to our no small modicum of profit at the next Marche de Roydeville, come next Candlemas.”
And so the once great Pine, broken to piecemeal, found its devious ways to widely different corners of Europe — there to be devoted to widely different uses. Part, sawn into firm posts and stanchions and fenced with many a bolt and iron plate, went to build the gloomy portcullis at the prison of the Petit Chatelet of Paris. Part passed downward to sunny Cremona, where, carefully fashioned into delicately bowed sounding boards, polished, carven, and gaily painted, it was transformed into many a vielle, gittern, or quaintly droning linter-colo. While still another portion, travelling again to feudal Paris, was roughly hewn and squared into a tree whose roots were in law and justice, and which, watered by blood unlawfully spilled, bore an evil and a loathly fruit which men cared not to look upon.
Amelot had been one of those knights so rare as yet in the Twelfth Century, who, either dissatisfied with the scantiness of their annual rental or having actually lost all their feudal possessions were obliged to live by the sale of their chivalry, whose valour and prowess were marketable articles to be haggled over and bargained for. To him war was a trade, tournaments, occasions where, not glory and honour, but material benefits, accruing from the sale of the forfeited arms and horses of vanquished knights, were to be won. He lived by his lance, he took life that he might live. Consequently, when after many months of suffering and confinement he rose from the Sire de Taillebois’ hospitable bed so maimed and shattered as never more to be able to sit a horse or couch a lance, he found his means of livelihood gone. Thus he had been obliged to have recourse to that nomadic vagabond existence, so romantic in the abstract, so bitter and degrading in the concrete reality, but which, taken altogether, has been of invaluable use to the librettists of the lighter Italian operas. He turned jongleur, what we to-day so erroneously call troubadour. His early education had in some degree fitted him for this profession, for it had been undertaken in the hall of the Baron of Taillebois, and chivalrous in its character had included something more than the rudiments of la gaye science. So he changed the lance for the lute, and carrying it under his arm went to that cradle of song and poetry where songsters were princes and princes songsters. He went to France, he went to Provence.
There was high revel in Chateau Sainte Edme.
The old Tourraine castle fluttered with bandelets and streamers from battlement to base. There had been tourneying in the outer court, hawking upon the glacis, archery and yeoman sports in the barbican, ring riding and lance practice in the plain just beyond the moat, tennis and jeux de paume in the grande-salle, and, to crown all, a monster game of chess in which the pieces were the living men-at-arms of the Count of Sainte Edme, apparelled and mounted as Knight, Bishop, and King and manoeuvred by command of the contesting players stationed in the flanking towers of the south wall. And then, after the gigantic flash in the banquet hall, where the principal dishes were brought in to the sound of the trumpet by knights on horseback and in full caparison, the tables had been drawn and the jongleurs summoned to display their talents for the pleasure of the assembled company, stimulated by the prize of a perfect Arab, trapped in samite, which an esquire held at the farther end of the hall.
Amelot was one of the number of jongleurs present.
The Arab would bring 2,500 livres Parisis almost anywhere, and samite was worth 40 golden sous an ell.
He felt sure of success.
By virtue of that royal generosity, which even in the households of the lesser feudatories was exercised in the jongleurs’ behalf, each one of the amants de la gaye science was offered the choice and made a present of the instrument with which he was to accompany his song. The methodical calculation of circumstance which his former life as mercenary had rendered so dominant in him was ever present with Amelot, and in consequence he had selected his song in reference to the character of those who were to listen to it. The majority of his audience spoke the liquid and sonorous langue d’oc, were dark, and of passionate, sensuous natures; with them love was a theme of never-failing interest; spirited war songs, ballads of the commonplace, or rondeaux and cantiliennes with their meaningless repetitions and complex construction were alike of little interest when compared to that passion which moved them so powerfully and which had made their complaintes Pastoureaux and Bugerettes, in which it was outpoured, so justly and so widely famous.
As songs of this character, with their slow movement and sustained
notes, could best be rendered upon a vielle, Amelot chose such an instrument, of marvellous workmanship, and prepared to sing a complainte of very recent Italian composition.
But no sooner had he laid his bow to the quivering strings than a strange spirit, seemingly emanating from the richly carven sounding box, took possession of him; he was no longer master of himself, the bow refused to obey his will, driven by one stronger than his own. The vielle seemed on a sudden to be endowed with some strange inhuman life; its sleek, varnished surface glittered, aye, and seemed to swell and contract like the hide of a serpent, and, like a serpent’s folds, the slack ends of the strings hanging from the pegs coiled themselves about his fingers and drove them along the keyboard with resistless force.
The vielle was playing of itself; by it he had become completely mastered, and had been transformed into the mere instrument of the instrument’s self. But as the vielle played on and chord after chord was evolved, he felt the hair of his flesh to stand up with an unspeakable horror, for the air was not his chosen composition, but one that had been the favourite of Yéres, and that once heard he could never now forget by virtue of the associations of horror and remorse of a dreadful deed with which its falling rhythm was so nearly connected.
At length the slow, persistent monotone became unbearable; he felt that with its further continuance he should go insane, and though he was powerless to stop, he endeavoured by a mighty effort to break into or jar upon it, anything to stop that low-pitched, crawling horror. Setting his teeth he drew the bow violently across the quivering strings with all the energy and power of his arm. Simultaneously the vielle responded, but with a chord, a sound, a cry that set his every nerve aprick with deadly horror, for the note evoked was the precise musical imitation of Yéres’ death scream.