by E. F. Benson
It occurred to Colonel Chase that Miss Howard’s painful untruthfulness had been the cause not of her losing him, but of her having the opportunity to win him, if she had been disposed. But to correct Mrs. Oxney (as they were not playing bridge, but having a heart-to-heart talk), would be the act of a pedant, and he let her faulty logic pass. . . . There she sat in her rich evening silk, very sympathetic and very comely, and quite void of deceit. He knew all about her, the solidity of her connexion, the excellence of her table, the admirable house-keeping qualities which made Wentworth so comfortable. After this turmoil of emotion these were peaceful thoughts.
“I have been deceived in Miss Howard,” he said, “but I dismiss it from my mind, and will not suffer it to sully the respect in which I have always held her sex. My experience of it has been far otherwise, and I have no doubt that it will continue to be so.”
He was astonished at the perfect phrasing of his magnanimous sentiments: Macaulay’s Essays could contain nothing more simple and dignified. The clock on the mantel-piece struck, and with scarcely less astonishment he heard it announce midnight.
“God bless my soul,” he cried, springing actively up from his low chair. “I had no idea it was so late. My packing still only half-finished, and you — ha, your beauty-sleep. Time for little boys and girls to be in bed, Mrs. Oxney. But this little boy has still to finish his packing. He will be glad when the day comes for him to pack again, and return to charming Wentworth.”
Mrs. Oxney was almost daring enough to offer to help in the mosaic-making. But perhaps that was a little too modern, and she contented herself with reciprocating his wish.
“Come back soon, Colonel,” she said. “Your room will always be ready for you, and I hope I shall have a little surprise in store for your return. It won’t be Wentworth without you.”
EPILOGUE
Florence and Alice happened to go to the Zoological Gardens on the afternoon of the day when Colonel Chase’s letter of condolence on the loss of the semi-detached villa had arrived. There they visited the monkey-house, and observing the antics of a most indelicate and ill-favoured ape exclaimed simultaneously:
“The Colonel!”
“So like, and just that swaggering manner,” said Alice.
“And look at him chattering with rage,” said Florence. “Just like his face when there came that avalanche of walnuts. Poor Mabel.”
“But this one chatters because there are no nuts,” said Alice. “Otherwise there’s no difference at all.”
“Let’s get him some nuts,” said Florence, “and we’ll see how he behaves when he eats. That’ll be a test if he’s really the Colonel.”
This was done: they burst into shrieks of laughter.
“So it is the Colonel,” said Alice. “No one else eats like that: no one could. What a sad change for him! No pedometer and bicycle rides. But I daresay that swinging on that rope does as well, and he tells them all how many times he has swung.”
They laughed again, and the keeper asked them not to irritate the animals.
The month’s honeymoon had gone in a sunny flash, and now after Florence’s Christmas visit to Bournemouth they were back in the flat again and had settled down. Alice was terribly busy over the most important picture of her career: Winter Sunset in Kensington Gardens, a very large sketch. She painted chiefly in the morning, because it was warmer then, but often came back towards dark for colour notes. Florence always sat on a camp-stool to her right, in order to keep the admiring connoisseurs of London from encroaching too near her painting-arm.
To-day at breakfast Florence was urging her friend to take a morning off, for she thought she had been working too hard.
“Besides, darling,” she said, “the sun’s so very bright. You can’t paint dusk in very strong sunlight, you’ve often said so. There’ll be plenty of grey days. And you do look a little tired. Stay quiet this morning: you may play the piano.”
“Are those Doctor Florence’s orders?” asked Alice picking up The Times.
“Yes, and she’s very firm. This afternoon we’ll go to the Zoo again, and see how the Colonel is getting on. We haven’t seen him for an age.”
Alice’s eye had been travelling down the first column of the outside sheet: her answer to Doctor Florence was a shrill scream.
“Flo, darling,” she cried. “Talk of the Colonel and he’ll appear. Here, the very first thing I saw. Guess!”
“Oh, is he dead?” asked Florence.
“No, guess again.”
“Not married?” she asked.
“Yes. Listen! ‘On Jan. 4, 1927, at St. Giles’s Church, Bolton Spa, by the Reverend Hildebrand Banks, M.A., assisted by the Reverend Eustace Toogood’ — yes, it’s coming presently— ‘Colonel Albert Chase late of the Indian Army to Margaret Oxney, widow of the late Septimus Oxney, of Wentworth, Bolton Spa.’”
“My dear, let me look!” cried Florence. “Well, I never! Did you?”
“That settles it,” said Alice. “We must go to the Zoo, not this afternoon, but at once, and congratulate him.”
They bought a bag of wedding nuts. The Colonel was swinging madly on his rope.
“Probably doing a record,” said Alice. “Come, Colonel! Such delicious nuts.”
The Colonel paid not the least attention to them, but when he had broken his record, sat and cuddled up to a stout and rather comely lady-ape, who received a few trivial connubialities with marked favour.
“And Mrs. Oxney!” said Alice.
THE END
RAVENS’ BROOD
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER I. SUNDAY PRAYERS
CHAPTER II. NANCY
CHAPTER III. DENNIS
CHAPTER IV. WEAVING THREADS
CHAPTER V. DENNIS GOES RUNNING
CHAPTER VI. THE STORM
CHAPTER VII. KENRITH COPSE
CHAPTER VIII. VOWS RENEWED
CHAPTER IX. THE LODGER
CHAPTER X. MIDSUMMER EVE
CHAPTER XI. EXPECTATIONS
CHAPTER XII. THE LUMP
CHAPTER XIII. MOLLIE PASSES
CHAPTER XIV. SUNDAY BY THE SEA
CHAPTER XV. THE PURGING BY FIRE
INTRODUCTION
THE house and the adjacent buildings of the farmstead were not visible from the high-road that crossed the upland to St. Buryan and to Land’s End, for a lane slanting rather steeply downwards led to them, and a copse of dwarfed and wind-combed trees intervened. The branches of these sloped almost horizontally away from the south-west, pressed there, like water-weeds in the current of a stream, by the flow of the prevalent wind. This lane was rough from want of repair, and channelled with the self-scooped drainage of winter storms; thick-built walls of shaly stone, in the interstices of which cushions of moss and polypody-ferns had established themselves, separated it from the fields that lay about it, and it ended in the spacious, straggling farmyard round which were set cowhouse and stablings and fowl-run.
The farm-house formed one side of this yard: two mullioned windows looked on to it, and between them, with a bundle of birch twigs to furnish a scraper for mud-laden boots, was the door into the kitchen, now the living-room of the family. Against the wall, below a broken-down shed, was piled a tumbled pyramid of mangel-wurzels nibbled and gnawed by sauntering livestock: cows took a bite at them as they passed to their milking, horses coming back from the plough crunched a mouthful, or a stray pig grunted and snouted among the roots, many of which were already sprouting again in the warmth of the spring weather. From the end of the farmhouse ran out the lichen-covered wall of the garden, in which was set a door covered with blistered and discoloured paint, and, on the side opposite, a gate sagging on its hinges led to the pasture; close beside this rose the supports and tarred roof of a haystack now nearly consumed. An untidy and ramshackle place, once solid and prosperous, but now mutely testifying to fallen fortunes.
Within, the house was a fine eighteenth-century homestead, two-storied and shingled with slabs o
f grey stone and pinnacled with heavy chimneys. Out of the kitchen a second door communicated with the passage running the length of the building: a broad oak staircase led to the upper story, and from this passage opened two parlours, now never lived in. Between these was the door, once the front door, into the garden: a big fanlight above it lit the passage and the stairs.
Outside, the square of flower garden lay sheltered and sequestered: the house screened it from the north, the rising upland from the west, a belt of trees from the east, and it lay open only to the softer airs from the south, where a plateau of pasture fields extended to the strip of down that fringed the low sea cliffs. This year the winter had been of singular mildness; no tweak of frost or flurry of snow had vexed the soft air, and now in this last week of February, doronicum and tulips, stock and wallflower were at the height of their blossoming, and a big square bed of daffodils danced and nodded in the light breeze. Below the house-wall was a double row of polyanthuses: their stems, stiff and straight, were like the path of rockets that had shot up and burst into groups of many-coloured stars. Behind them, japonica and white jasmine threaded dilapidated trellises, and a great magnolia, thick of trunk, and with branches that climbed up to the eaves of the house, covered the greater part of the wall, framing the windows in its long varnished leaves. All this month it had been in flower, and the cream-coloured blossoms of thick leather-like petals dripped with heavy fragrance.
A short wing ran out from beyond the main oblong of the farmhouse and projected into the garden. Originally it had been a carriage-house with a couple of small rooms above it, but a few years ago, when money was not quite so scarce with him as it was to-day, John Pentreath, the present owner, had spent a hundred pounds in converting this wing into a separate apartment, turning the carriage-house into a big studio-like sitting-room. The two small rooms above had been knocked into one, a stairway had been constructed inside the house to give access to it, and now there were few weeks during the summer months when this lodging was not occupied by some tenant, artist or holidaymaker, who was in search of privacy and was content with plain and excellent fare, cooked and supplied for him from the kitchen of the farm. A door with panels of glass gave him access from his living-room into the garden and to the field path that led eastwards down over the brow of the hill to the village of St. Columb’s below, and thus he could come and go without passing through the house. He had his own little fenced lawn and flower-beds unoverlooked from other windows, and from it he could see between the tree-trunks glimpses of the glittering bay and watch the sea-gulls circling in the sky or listen to the music of blackbirds in the bushes. Here, undisturbed, he could bask in the warm brooding quiet of the drowsy air, or, if his mood changed and he tired of these languors, he had but to leave the garden; cross the farmyard, and ascending the steep lane, find himself on the high empty uplands, which, treeless and austere, stretched away westwards to the Atlantic. Or if he was more gregariously inclined, he could take the path to St. Columb’s, and ten minutes’ walk would bring him to the grey-roofed village that lay huddled on the shore of the bay. A pier, solidly built against the battling of the great seas of winter gales, gave shelter to the fishing fleet, and he could sit there among the tawny nets hung out to dry, or bathe from the sandy beaches beyond. The narrow streets of the village, that were too steep for horse-traffic, were stepped for the convenience of foot passengers, and along them were set up the innumerable easels of the artists who all summer long flocked to the village and perennially and interminably reproduced in oil- or water-colour the picturesque corners, or recorded their impression of the bay in all aspects of storm and calm, or found models for their pictures among the sunburnt youth of the handsome fisherfolk. The Celtic blood had been crossed, it was supposed, with some antique Phoenician stock, that traded round these coasts before ever the Romans set foot in England, and the dark-haired black-eyed strain persisted still among the more northern type.
The natives regarded the yearly invasion of the English as an ingress of foreign folk: they put them up in their houses, they posed for their pictures, or took them out for the fishing when the pilchards had been sighted in the bay, and all night long the lights of the drifting boats moved with the tide, like a company of stars risen from the sea; but these Cornish were a race apart; their blood went to a different tune, and they knew secrets and hidden lore, of which they seldom spoke to strangers, however intimate. Should a farmer’s cattle have been dying in some unaccountable fashion, there was not a native-born man who did not suspect that a witch had been at work, and perhaps a chance word would be dropped about it. But instantly it would be bitten off short, and the foreign-fellow, however much he might ask, would get no farther: he was not fit to know, being a foreigner, affairs that did not concern him. Again, the native population of the village would turn out in broadcloth and female finery to go to church or to chapel of a Sunday morning, and they might be instant in prayer, and loud in singing, and attentive to the long discourse of the minister, but it would be a mistake to suppose that their sense of religion, of the unseen and potent powers that guided or menaced the ways of their lives, was confined to the doctrines and dogmas that they recited there, or that their only prayers were addressed to the Persons of those doxologies. There were other powers besides these, not to be openly addressed, nor praised with loud mouth to the braying of a harmonium, nor talked of, even among themselves, except in whispers and mutterings and noddings. There was a copse, for instance, a mile away from the village, which no prudent man would enter after dark, preferring to skirt round it rather than risk the traverse of it by the direct path that led past a big slab of stone, altar-shaped, that stood in the heart of the wood. Old Sally Austell might have hobbled up there from the village, and it would never do to meet her there, when she was busy with her own concerns.
Out in the open, a couple of fields away from the garden of the Pentreath farmhouse and on land belonging to John Pentreath, was a strange circle of stones, monoliths of granite. Young Dennis Pentreath, his grandson, had ploughed the field, near the lower side of which they stood, only a week or two before, but of course he had not run his furrow through the circle, nor had approached within a couple of yards of it. Never had ploughshare trespassed on that precinct, but it lay virgin, and covered with the short down-grass, fragrant with thyme and bright with low-growing herbs, a green circle in the middle of the ruddy shining slices of fresh-turned soil. In all there were four and twenty stones, each set some few yards from its neighbour, at intervals as precise as those between the hours on a clock-dial. They were approximately uniform in height and of such stature that a man might conveniently lean his elbow on the top of any, as he stood musing about the origin of these roughly-hewn monoliths. At the eastern end of the circle, however, the interval between two of these stones was just double of that between all the rest, and these two stones were taller than the others: it was as if they might conceivably have formed a portal to the precinct within. Archaeologists and antiquaries were mostly agreed that this was some Druidic or pre-Druidic temple: some held that the two tall stones at the east end were of phallic signification.
But if an English visitor to St. Columb’s, however familiar to them, had asked any of the fisher-folk or the farm-folk of the neighbouring homesteads what local history was attached to it, he would certainly have been told only the childish Christian legend which was current about it. That circle of stones was once a company of lads and lasses, twenty-two of them, who had been light-minded enough to dance in the field there one Sunday morning, and those two tall pillars at the east had been the hapless fiddlers who had made music for them. There came by, as they were footing it merrily, the holy man, St. Columb himself, and they laughed at him and mocked him, when he rebuked them and bade them leave their Godless antics and follow him, as Christians should, to church on this morning of the Lord’s Day. Since they would not hearken to him, he invoked the wrath of God on them for their wickedness, and behold, they were instantly turned into
stone, where they stand now for a warning to all ungodly men. All that of course was nonsense: in no other spirit does a mother tell her inquisitive child that a neighbour’s wife has found a little baby under the gooseberry bushes in the garden. It was a reply meant to stop further inquiries, and neither informant nor informed believed it for a moment. But the informant, it would have been plain, knew more than that, but did not choose to divulge it: he put you off with this foolish legend.
But if you had chanced to be at St. Columb’s on some Midsummer Eve, then indeed you might have been sure that there was something behind the foolish legend, for on that night, unmindful of the doom that the saint called down on those who had frisked there, the circle that lay untrodden all the year round would be full of young couples, boys and girls, who had been lately married, dancing together, and there might be old couples, too, stiffly capering till their breath failed them. The rest of the folk, old and young, stood outside it watching, and half Penzance came up to see the dancing, and some to join in it, and all the farms for five miles round would be left that night in charge of sheep-dogs, while the families came in to St. Columb’s. That night, too, in the field below there would be lit a great bonfire, and odd rites were practised there. As its flames died down and there was left only a bed of glowing ashes, a young couple, boy and girl, would run downhill towards it, hand in hand, and leap across it. That meant something surely: there would be whispered comments among the spectators, they pointed to the leapers, they laughed or they applauded. But it would be idle for the Englishman, the foreigner, to ask what it all meant, to inquire who leaped and why, and why some danced, and others equally young and agile refrained. There was something there, common knowledge to the natives, but not spoken of, some elemental creed passed on below the breath from generation to generation.