Sandro slid down the well rope.
“Signor.”
“Hallo! Any news, Sandro?”
“I saw nothing but old Cæsare, moonstruck and solemn. Nor did I hear any of that devil’s music.”
“Good. I will follow you up. Catarina has filled my knapsack with food. You will not see me again, Sandro, till we have finished with the full moon.”
Trevanion was in the woods well before daybreak and safely posted in the fork of his oak tree. The spread of the old trunk was like a flat basket, and he could curl up in it and lie hidden with the dome of leaves screening him above. The hollow chestnut tree was visible through a gap in the foliage. Trevanion had fastened a spray of oak leaves over his hat, so that he could look out over the edge of his eyrie and keep the whiteness of his face from betraying him to any bird of prey who might perch in that tree over yonder.
The day passed at last, with the setting sun sending long rays of light into every woodland eyelet-hole and window. The cool of the evening was in comradeship with Trevanion’s quickened suspense.
And then he stiffened and raised his head like a startled dog.
A moment later he saw the thing that he had heard, a strange, hairy thing that trotted on goat’s legs, and whose throat, arms and shoulders were white like a man’s. It was the figure of Pan, Pan himself, old Cæsare’s woodland god, and Trevanion saw it lift itself up into the chestnut tree and disappear.
VI
Maestro Lombardi had been very restless all that day, and about sunset Rosamunda heard the sound of strange laughter, laughter that made her afraid. Going out to see the meaning of it, she found her father skipping up and down the terrace, laughing and beating time with his flute to some quite mad and imaginary music.
“Thrice Blessed Virgin, it is the night of the great god. To-night the pride of your father will be complete. Pan comes, my daughter; Pan the great lover!”
She shrank away and fled into the house.
“I am afraid, Maria, afraid of something that I can feel but cannot see or hear. There is a something in my father’s madness.”
“It is the moon, signorina; nothing but the moon.”
“Maria, I shall not go down and bathe in the pool to-night.”
“S-sh, s-sh, it is nothing but fancy! I will go with you, signorina, and it is best to humour the old man.”
“You will not leave me, Maria.”
“Cara mia, why should I leave you?”
Trevanion spent quite five minutes in getting out and away from that oak tree. He had waited till it was dark, and then slipped down the trunk with the caution of a man creeping from a prison and with an enemy on the alert hardly thirty paces away. He had had to leave his sword in that crow’s nest, for the thing would have cumbered him, but he had kept his pistols.
He got on his feet as soon as he judged it safe, and made his way down through the open woods towards the Satyr’s Pool. It was very dark now, but he was glad of the darkness. Reaching the valley, he turned slightly towards the left and walked on very slowly, pausing often to listen. It was his plan to strike the half-dry stream that was the overflow from the pool, and work up it till he reached the pool itself, for should any of the Austrian’s people be on the watch, there was less chance of his blundering into them if he followed the stream.
The plan worked well. He crawled the last fifty yards, till his hands touched the flattish rocks around the pool and he saw the level gleam of the water with the silver point of a star reflected in it here and there. He remembered that a stunted old laurel grew on the south side of the pool. It was visible as a bunch of blackness, and he crawled to it and crept in under the branches. As he squirmed himself comfortable, his hand touched something hard and round and heavy. It was an old water-worn stone about the size of a six-pound shot, a thing that persuaded his fingers that it might have its uses where pistols were not to be trusted.
The night was extraordinarily still, and when the moon heaved a yellow rim over the edge of the world the night seemed even more eerily silent. Trevanion felt like a taut wire. He had raised himself on his elbows, for he could judge now how he was placed with regard to his field of vision. The foliage of the laurel hung short of the ground, much like a tent with the “flies” looped up, and Trevanion had no reason for quarrelling with his luck. He found that he could see most of the valley ahead of him, the fringe of the woods on his right, and on his left the white wall, wooden gate and the end of the stairway leading up to the villa. The laurel hid him in its smother of black shadow. He could not have been more cunningly placed.
The first sounds he heard that night were the shrill notes of a pipe and bursts of faun-like laughter. The laughter sent a little shiver of emotion through him. It was so mad, so unrestrained, so gloating, so naively exultant. Then old Cæsare appeared crowned with vine leaves, and dancing in the moonlight.
On the terrace of the Villa Lunetta the madman began piping under his daughter’s window. Rosamunda was seated on her bed, filled with a dread of some vague horror, a kind of ghost fear that made her eyes look like the eyes of a frightened child.
She went to the window.
“Father!”
He stretched out his arms to her.
“Hail, virgin; hail, fortunate and sacred one!”
Then she heard Maria’s voice in the room.
“Tst, it is near midnight, cara mia, and when the play is over and the old gentleman happy, we can please ourselves and get to bed. To-morrow he will be himself again. It is the moon.”
“I cannot go, Maria!”
“Courage, signorina; it is just a child’s game played to please a child. I have brought you a cup of warm wine.”
“You will stop with me, Maria?”
“Have I not promised?”
That warm wine had poppy seeds crushed in it, but Rosamunda drank it and suspected nothing.
Maria threw a cloak over the girl’s shoulders, and they passed out of the house, across the moonlit terrace, and down the steps between the black ilexes and pines. Cæsare had vanished, and they heard his piping and his laughter in the valley below, and when Trevanion saw him he was capering up and down like a faun calling on another faun to come and romp in the moonlight. Trevanion forgot the madman for a moment, for he heard a sound of women’s voices and saw figures moving down the steps. They came out through the little gate, Rosamunda first, the woman following her, and from the uncertain and almost shrinking way she moved Trevanion knew that Rosamunda was afraid.
His heart went out to her with fierce tenderness, but he lay still and bided his time.
Then Cæsare came into his view again, a figure that had grown silent and attentive and strangely sinister. He had drawn near and yet stood aloof, arms folded, head cocked, very straight and stiff. Trevanion could have sworn that his ears were pricked and that there was a mad leer on his face.
A quick glance to the right showed him an empty sweep of moonlit ground ending in the blackness of the woods.
Nothing moved there. Pan still tarried.
“Maria!”
Rosamunda’s voice brought Trevanion’s eyes back to the pool. She was standing on the flat rock which she always used, and Maria had taken her cloak. Trevanion saw her white hands unfastening the laces of her dress, and she had shaken her hair free so that it hung in a cloud.
“Maria!”
“Cara mia?”
“Have you the towel? It will be so cold, Maria, and I feel so sleepy.”
“Tut, tut! Go in to your knees and no further, signorina. It should satisfy the old man.”
The dark dress dropped and lay in a ring about her feet. She was in white now; her hands seemed to fumble, and her face was like the face of one dazed. Trevanion was on his knees, tense, awed, counting this night a sacrament, love, pity, and a great anger stirring in his heart. He was watching Maria, the woman, for the whole vile wickedness of the thing seemed to hang upon her treachery.
“Maria, are you there?”
“Behind you.”
“Take my necklace. It’s all so strange; I feel I am falling asleep.”
“Tut, tut! It will soon be over.”
The last white drapery fell about Rosamunda’s feet, and as it fell Trevanion saw the woman start, turn quickly, and move stealthily away. She threw a half-frightened look behind her as she went, and that glance of hers gave Trevanion his warning.
“Good God!”
For old Cæsare had sent up a strange, exultant cry, and was standing like a man in an ecstasy, staring at the goat-god of his dreams. It had come leaping from the woods, and was within a stone’s throw of the pool before Trevanion turned and saw it, a great creature of hair and nakedness with horns showing black on its forehead. So close was it that Trevanion uttered the oath of a man who has been caught asleep at his post. He groped for that stone of his, and broke out into the moonlight.
He was late, late by two score yards, and that cry of Rosamunda’s was like a bitter cry of accusation. He had one glimpse of her in the creature’s arms, a white figure that drooped and struggled feebly, head drawn back, hair hanging. Trevanion made never a sound, but his eyes were the eyes of a man who meant to kill.
Cæsare’s Pan had thrown the girl to the ground and was bending over her, when he heard the sound of a man running and glanced up. His eyeballs shone white in the moonlight. His lower lip seemed to droop and to show his teeth.
“Von Mirenbach!”
That challenge answered. The thing’s hand went to its hairy belly, and drew out something that flashed. He was up and striking at Trevanion, but Trevanion was too quick for the Austrian. His hand whirled; the stone found Pan’s face and that god of hair and of horns fell forward and lay still.
OLD FAGUS
It was a very old garden.
John Osbald, the gardener, had worked in it for nearly forty years, and even in his time the soft, blurred texture of the red brick wall had changed but little. It had changed much less than the gardener’s face, for the red wall of “Bassets” drank the wind and the rain, and old John’s complexion owed something to ale as well as to the weather.
He was a hale, upstanding, handsome old fellow, a bit of an oddity, and something of an autocrat. In the village of Bury St. James he was held to be a man of repute, “Mr. Osbald o’ ‘Bassets’,” very wise in the ways of all things that grew. Other men came to him for advice. “Ask old John.”
So at seventy he looked what he was, white and wise-headed and fresh of face, a man who had a right to feel that he was somebody in those parts. The garden at Bassets was part of him and his pride. He might be the tyrant of the potting-shed; it was his privilege to be incredibly obstinate, and to rule his under-gardener and boy as they deserved to be ruled. John Osbald was very much a person.
For he had been fortunate in those whom he served: both plants and people. He had been grower of flowers and fruit to the Tremaines, and the Tremaines had treated him as they treated the garden, lovingly and with the respect of those who live on the soil. The garden was—in a sense—John Osbald’s garden; also, it was John Osbald, blood and muscle and soul of him.
Bury St. James looked at things in the same way. The old red Jacobean house was Tremaine; but the lawns and the borders and the yew hedges and the cedars and the fruit trees were John Osbald. The stone pillars of the great gates carried two shields, and upon them were the arms of the Tremaines; but upon the iron gates themselves hung a fairy scroll upon which was written—“John—His Garden.”
He loved it. For years he had given it all that was strong and patient and cunning in himself. He loved every tree; but particularly did he love the great beech tree by the postern gate close to the ivy-covered garden house. Every morning of his life John entered by that gate, and every morning he would look up at that stately tree.
He saw it in its naked, winter symmetry; in the young sheen of May; in the massive greenness of summer; in the splendour of autumn.
Almost he raised a hat to that tree. They knew each other, and between tree and gardener there was mystic understanding.
“Good morning, Old Fagus.”
“Good morning, John.”
So, for years, they had greeted each other, and the tree had seemed to stretch friendly hands over the figure of the working man.
But the Tremaines were a failing force. The two sons were killed in the Great War. Old Roger Tremaine died soon after peace had been declared; and his wife lasted two years longer—a sad woman who had wandered about the garden as though it was a place of ghosts. She and old John had been the last ones left.
“It seems so strange, John, so very strange, to be here alone.”
She had looked like a Christmas rose trying to flower for the last time in the deeps of winter, and before the Lent lilies bloomed, she was dead.
John Osbald emptied his hot-houses to grace her coffin, and said deep silent things to the great beech tree.
“You and I go on, Old Fagus, but you’ll last longer than I.”
Bassets went to a cousin, but the old ways and means were dead. Somerset House had to have its blood money, and the Tremaines were not the Tremaines of a memorable tradition. Bassets was put on the market, and was bought by a gentleman, one—Percy Prance—head of a syndicate that operated provincial music-halls and theatres. This gentleman had been knighted during the war. No one knew why; but that did not matter.
John Osbald and Sir Percy Prance met for the first time on a September afternoon. A bright young architect had descended upon Bassets, an easy, accommodating fellow who lauded the new gentleman with “sirs.” That there were to be changes, renovations, improvements, was evident. The motor-car had displaced the horse, and Olivia Tremaine’s piano would be less than a memory when the loud-speaker got going.
Percy Prance himself was a “loud-speaker”—a trombone of a man. He was cheerful, florid, slightly greasy, with one of those resonant voices that continue like a fog-horn in thick weather. He was not a bad sort of man provided he had his way, but his way was rather like the track of saurian. There was more belly in him than brain.
These two men met on the terrace. Osbald had been sent for, and had come slowly from the fruit-garden with an expression of watchfulness in his blue eyes. Sir Percy had brought tea with him in the car. He stood with feet well apart on the terrace, his thick fingers rolling a cigar.
“You’re Osbald, are you?”
He had been expecting Osbald to touch his hat, and Osbald did not touch it. He stood and looked at the knight. He was oak, not willow like the bright young architect.
“Yes—I be.”
Sir Percy bit off the end of the cigar. He prided himself on having bitten off more than most men could chew. He was rather full of his new glory, and he expected to be treated with deference.
“What’s your age?”
Osbald’s blue eyes were unblinking.
“Seventy, come Michaelmas.”
Sir Percy looked at him slant-wise out of his clever and commercial little eyes. He was not pleased with Osbald. He seemed to sense in Osbald a contumacy, a bucolic stiff-neckedness that did not bend as it should have bent to the new glory. Sir Percy believed that there was but one way to deal with such people, the prompt application of pressure. Always he had found such pressure effective, perhaps because he had had to deal only with a scared and sycophantic society that had to walk mincingly in the presence of a monopolist.
“Look here, my man, if you want to stay on here you had better call me ‘sir’.”
It was a fairly blatant letting loose of the realities of the new dispensation, and it seemed to catch John Osbald like a sudden icy wind in the eyes. The finger and thumb of his right hand picked at the flap of his pocket. Something very singular and terrible had happened. The new presence had promulgated a threat, and never before in his life had John Osbald been threatened.
He might be slow and deliberate both in speech and movement, but he was more sensitive than was the knight to such subtle variations as a changing
sky or of sudden sunlight and the moods of men and of things. He had a quick understanding of what those words implied. Unless he truckled to this fellow with the flabby red face he would be sacked. He would come no more into this garden, and the garden of Bassets was himself. Even at seventy a man’s soul may utter a bitter cry, and as old Osbald’s fingers fumbled at the flap of his pocket he rolled shame under his tongue and swallowed it. Yet the whole business occupied but little more time than it would take to swing a scythe.
He nodded.
“As it may please you, sir.”
Sir Percy smiled. He could be bland when the oil was applied. This was much better.
“You’ve been here a pretty long time, Osbald.”
“Near forty years.”
He forgot the “sir,” and added it; and the knight noticed the delay in Osbald’s production of the title. It annoyed him; it annoyed him more than had the previous omission. It was as though the badge of respect did not stick to him naturally.
“That’s a long time. Do you think you’re up to your work?”
Osbald fingered his chin.
“The Tremaines, they was satisfied, sir.”
“Oh, I dare say; but I’m not a Tremaine, my man. I shall want changes here. You understand that, eh?”
Again his fat voice threatened, and old Osbald’s eyes gazed past him at the house.
“Oh, aye, I’ve seen changes. I’ve kept this garden in high fettle for nigh on forty years. It’s my job, sir.”
Almost the oak of him trembled. His eyes were anxious.
“All right. I’ll give you a trial, Osbald. How many men have you under you?”
“Another man and a boy, sir.”
“Is that enough?”
“It was enough, sir, for the Tremaines.”
And again the new knight was annoyed. Damn the Tremaines! It was his wish to efface the Tremaines, and to make “Bassets” “Prance” from tennis-court to garage, and here was this old brown stump of a man stuck in the soil and reminding him of rotten old traditions. He cleared his throat.
The Short Stories of Warwick Deeping Page 8