Part 28

"The Pan-pipes, too," he said--"they are never silent now: I hear them all the time, and I take that to mean that I am at last never unconscious of the hymn of life. I heard them at first, you know, just in snatches and broken stanzas, when I could screw myself up to the realisation of the song without end and without words that goes up from the earth day and night. Where does it come from? As I told Evelyn, I neither know nor care. Perhaps my brain conceives it, and sends the message to my ears, but it is really simpler to suppose that I hear it, just as you hear my voice talking to you now. For there is no question as to the fact of its existence; the hymn of praise does go on forever. So, perhaps, in my small way, I am complete, so to speak, with regard to that. Then--then there is another thing that may be behind the curtain. It may be that I shall be shown, and if I am shown this, it must be right and necessary--all the sorrow and pain and death that is in the world. I have turned my back on it; I have said it was not for me. But perhaps it will have to be for me. And that--to use a convenient phrase--will be to see Pan."

He paused on the word, then shook his hair back from his forehead, and got up.

"And now I have told you all," he said.

Philip got up, too, feeling somehow as if he had been mesmerised. He could remember all that Merivale had said; it was strangely vivid, but it had a dreamlike vividness about it; the fabric, the texture, the colour of it, for all its vividness, was unreal somehow, unearthly. But as to the reality of it and the truth of it, no question entered his head. He had never heard anything, no commonplace story or chronicle of indubitable events which was less fantastic. He looked out in silence a moment over the garden, and though half an hour ago he had been vaguely frightened at the thought of the mysterious and occult powers that keep watch over the world, yet now when they had been spoken of with such frankness, so that they seemed doubly as real as they had before, he was frightened no longer. It was, indeed, as Merivale had said; he had been afraid of fear.

It was already very late, and after a few trivial words he went indoors to go up to bed. As he got to the bottom of the stairs he looked back once, and saw his friend standing still on the verandah, with his face towards him. And as Philip turned, Merivale, standing under the lamp in his white shirt and flannels, with collar unfastened at the neck and sleeves rolled up to the elbow, smiled and nodded to him.

"Good night!" he said; "sleep well. I think you are learning how to do that again."

* * * * *

Philip began undressing as soon as he got to his room, feeling unaccountably tired and weary. His servant slept in a room just opposite him, and he hesitated for a moment as to whether he should tell him not to call him in the morning till he rang, for he had that heaviness of head which only satiety of sleep entirely removes. But it was already late, and the man had probably been in bed and asleep for some time. So he closed his door, drew the blind down over his window, and put out his light. His brain, for all the vividness of that evening's talk, seemed absolutely numb and empty, as if all memory were dead, and he fell asleep instantly.

He slept heavily for several hours, and then external sounds began to mingle themselves with his dreams, and he thought he was in a large, empty, brown-coloured hall lit by dim windows very high up, through which a faint, tired light was peering. But now and again the squares of these windows would be lit up for a moment vividly from outside, and as often as this happened some low, heavy, tremulous sound echoed in the vault above him like a bass bourdon note. He was conscious, too, that many unseen presences surrounded him; the hall was thick with them, and they were all saying: "Hush-sh-sh!" A sense of deadly oppression and coming calamity filled him, he was waiting for something, not knowing what it was. Then the coils of sleep began to be more loosened, and before long he awoke. His room looked out over the garden, and the "Hush-sh-sh" was but the rain that fell heavily on to the shrubs below his window. Then the light and the tremulous note were explained too, for suddenly the window started into brightness, and a couple of seconds after a sonorous roll of thunder followed. But the uneasiness of the dream had not passed: he still felt frightfully apprehensive. All desire for sleep, however, had left him, and for some half hour, perhaps, he lay still, listening to the windless rain, for the night was so still that his blind hung over the open window without tapping or stirring. Then with curious abruptness the rain ceased altogether and there was dead silence.

Then suddenly a frightful cry rent and shattered the stillness, and from outside a screaming, strangled voice called:

"Oh, my God!" it yelled. "Oh, Christ!"

For one moment Philip lay in the grip and paralysis of mortal fear, but the next he broke through it, and sprang out of bed, and, not pausing to light a candle, stumbled to the door. At the same moment his servant's door flew open, and he came out with a white, scared face. He carried a lighted candle.

"It was from the garden, sir," he said. "It was Mr. Merivale's voice."

Philip did not answer, but went quickly downstairs, followed by the man. The door into the verandah stood open, as usual, and he hurried out. There on the table were the cloth and the remains of dessert; his chair stood where he had sat all evening; Merivale's was pushed sideways. The moon was somewhere risen behind the clouds, for thick as they were, the darkness was not near pitch, and followed by the servant, the light of whose candle tossed weird, misshapen shadows about, Philip set his teeth and went down towards where the hammock was slung in which Merivale usually slept.

That strange, pungent smell, which he had noticed more than once before, was heavy in the air, and infinitely stronger and more biting than it had been. And for one moment his flesh crept so that he stopped, waiting for the man to come up with the light. He could not face what might be there alone.

A few yards further on they came in sight of the hammock. Something white, a flannelled figure, glimmered there, but, like some strange, irregular blot, something black concealed most of the occupant. Then that black thing, whatever it was, suddenly skipped into the air and ran with dreadful frolicsome leaps and bounds and tappings on the brick path of the pergola, down to the far end of the garden, where they lost sight of it. Then they came to the hammock.

Merivale was sitting up in it, bunched up together with his head drawn back, as if avoiding some deadly contact. His lips were drawn back from his teeth, so that the gums showed, his eyes were wide-open, and terror incarnate sat there, and the pupils were contracted to a pin-point as if focussed on something but an inch or two from him. He was not dead, for his chest heaved with dreadful spasms of breathing, and Philip took him up and carried him away from that haunted place into the house, laying him on a rug in the passage.

But before they had got him there the breathing had ceased, the mouth and the eyes had closed, and what they looked on was just the figure of a boy whose mouth smiled, and who was sunk in happy, dreamless sleep.

There was nothing to be done. Philip knew that, but he sent his servant off at once to fetch a doctor from Brockenhurst, while he waited and watched by Merivale or what had been he. All terror and shrinking had utterly passed from that face, and Philip himself, in spite of the frightful, inexplicable thing that had happened, was not frightened either, but sat by him, feeling curiously calm and serene, hardly conscious even of sorrow or regret. Nor did he fear any incomer from the garden. For the curtain had been drawn, and the dead man had felt so sure that whatever form the revelation was to take, it would be God, that the assurance of his belief filled and quieted the man who watched by him.

His shirt was open at the neck, as Philip had seen him last, standing below the lamp on the verandah, and his sleeves were rolled back to above the elbow. And as Philip looked, he saw slowly appearing on the skin of his chest and the sunburnt arms curious marks, which became gradually clearer and more defined, marks pointed at one end, the print of some animal's hoofs, as if a monstrous goat had leaped and danced on him.

* * * * *

It was a week later, and Philip was seated alone with his mother in the small drawing-room of his house at Pangbourne which they generally used if there was no one with them. He had arrived home only just before dinner that night, and when it was over he had talked long to her, describing all that had happened during his stay with Merivale, all that had culminated in that night of terror about which even now he could hardly speak. The story had been a long one, sometimes he spoke freely, at other points there were silences, for the words would not come, and his choking throat and trembling lips had to be controlled before he could find utterance. For it concerned not Merivale only; and, indeed, friend of his heart as he had been, one who could never be replaced, Philip could scarcely think of his death as sad.

"For though," he said, "just for that moment when he cried on God's name and on the name of Christ, when that terror, whatever it was, came close to him, the flesh was weak, yet I know he was not afraid. He had told me so: his spirit was not afraid. And he so longed to see the curtain drawn."

The joy of getting Philip back again, the joy, too, of knowing that that black crust of hate and despair no longer shut him off from her, was so great, that Mrs. Home hardly regarded the anxiety she would otherwise have felt. For she had never seen Philip like this; what had happened had stirred him to the depths of his soul. Even the sudden and dreadful death of so old a friend she could not have imagined would have affected him so.

"Philip, dear," she said, "you are terribly excited and overwrought. Get yourself more in control, my darling."

He was quiet for a moment, and even lit a cigarette, but he threw it away again immediately.

"Ah, mother, when I have finished you will see," he said. "Let me go on."

He paused a moment, and the soft stroking of her hand on his calmed him.

"It was just dawn when Flynn came back with the doctor," he said; "a clear, dewy dawn, the sort of dawn Tom loved. The doctor needed but one glance, one touch. Then he said: 'Yes, he has been dead for more than an hour.' So I suppose I had sat there as long as that; I did not think it had been more than a minute or two. Then his eye fell on those marks and bruises I told you of, and he looked at them. He undressed him a little further: there were more of them. I needn't go into that, but you know what the surface of a lane looks like when a flock of sheep has passed?--it was like that.

"All this, of course, came out at the inquest, where I told all I knew, and Flynn corroborated it. I saw also what Tom had told me that afternoon, how a huge goat had sparred and gambolled round him as he came home across the forest. And the verdict, as you say, perhaps, was brought in, in accordance with that. The world will be quite satisfied. I am satisfied, too, but not in that way."

He was silent again a moment, and then went on.

"It all hangs together," he said; "the dear Hermit was not as all of us are: he could talk to birds and beasts, and the very peace of God encompassed him. He knew, in a way we don't, that all-embracing fatherhood. I learned slowly, these weeks I was with him, what the truth of that was to him. And he used often to speak, as you know, of the grim side of Nature, of the cruelty and death, which he had turned his face from, which he called Pan, who, as the myths have it, appeared in form like a goat, to see whom was death. We had been talking of it that night, we both heard curious tramplings in the bushes, and the pungent smell of a goat. Every sensible person, considering, too, that he had seen a big goat that afternoon, would come to the conclusion that, somehow or other the brute had found its way into the garden, and had sprung on him like a wild beast, and trampled him. Then, too, he was thinking about Pan; he might have imagined when the goat appeared, that this was what he in those imaginings, if you like, which were as real to him as the sun and moon, believed to be Pan, and that he died of fright. The jury took the view that some wild goat was the cause of his death: I daresay fifty juries would have done the same. But if you ask me whether I believe that a goat, a flesh and blood goat, killed him, why I laugh at you. For what goat was that? Who saw the goat except the Hermit?"

He paused again, and looked up at his mother with sudden solicitude.

"Ah, dear, you are crying," he said. "Shall I not go on?"

Again that gentle, loving stroking of his hand began.

"Ah, my son," she said.

Philip kissed the hand that stroked his. These lines were easy to read between.

But if he had more to tell his mother, she had something also to tell him that he did not know yet.

"You see, I saw such strange and impossible things there," he went on, "that nothing seems strange nor impossible. It was like an allegory: Tom himself was an allegory. The birds came to his bidding, the shy creatures of the forest were his friends. It was no miracle: it was but what we all could do, if we realised what he realised, and knew as he knew the brotherhood of all that lives. He put into practice the theory of Darwinism that no one in theory denies. The living things were his brothers and his cousins: they knew it, too. But from one huge fact, the fact of sorrow and pain, he turned aside, and, so I believe, it all came to him in a flash, making him perfect. And it came in material form, at least it was so material that it could bruise his flesh. It seems cruel; but--oh, mother, if you had seen his face afterwards, you would have known that the hand that made him suffer comforted him when he had learned what the suffering had to teach him. It could have been done, I must suppose, in no other way."

Then for a little the strong man was very weak, and he broke down and wept. But one who weeps while eyes so tender watch, weeps tears that are not bitter, or at least are sweetened, each one, as it falls. Then again he went on: much as he had told, there was all to tell yet, yet that all was but short--a few words were sufficient.

"And so my lesson came home to me," he said. "A month ago I said, as you know, 'I will hate, I will injure.' A fortnight ago I said, 'What good is that?' But now, when poor Tom, who was all kind and all gentle, had to be taught like that, with those battering hoofs, that pain must be and that one must accept it and sorrow, and not leave them out of life, now I say, 'Can I help? May not I bear a little of it?'"

He got up.

"You don't know me," he said. "I don't know myself. But I suppose this is how such a thing comes to one. I have been in an outer darkness: I have been black and bitter and all my life before that I was hard. That, I suppose, was needful for me. I don't think I am going to be a prig, but if that is so, perhaps it doesn't much matter. But I do know this, that I am sorry for poor things."

Mrs. Home said nothing for the moment; then she turned her eyes away as she spoke.

"You have not heard then, dear?" she said.

"I have heard nothing."

"It was in the paper this evening," she said. "I know no more than that. Evelyn was shot in the face yesterday."

Then her voice quivered.

"They think he will live," she said. "But they know he will be blind. Oh, Philip, think of Evelyn blind!"

TWENTIETH

The room where Madge had talked with her mother on the evening of her first day at Glen Callan was darkened, and only a faint, muffled light came in through the blinded windows. The clean, neat apparatus of nursing was there, a fire burned on the hearth, by which Madge sat, and on the bed lay a figure, the face of which was swathed in bandages. The whole of the upper part of it was thus covered, only the chin and mouth appeared, and round the mouth was the three days' beard of a young man.

It was a little after midday; the nurse had gone to her lunch, and had told Madge to ring for her if she wanted her. It was not the least likely: all was going as well as it apparently could, but while Evelyn was still feverish it was necessary to be on the guard for any one of a myriad dangers that might threaten him. There was the danger of blood-poisoning; there were the after-effects of the shock; other things also were possible. Madge had not inquired into it all; she knew only what it was right for her to know if she was in charge of the sick-room for an hour or two. If he got very restless, if he came to himself--for he was kept drowsy with drugs--and complained of pain, she was to ring the bell. But the nurse did not think that there was any real likelihood of any of these things happening.

They had carried him back over the wire bridge, above which the accident had happened, and now for nearly forty-eight hours he had lain where he lay now. By great good luck a surgeon of eminent skill had been staying in a house not very far off, and he had come over at once, in answer to this call, and done what had to be done. Madge had seen him afterwards, and very quietly, as Evelyn's wife, had asked to be told, frankly and fully, what had been necessary. Sir Francis Egmont, whose surgical skill was only equalled by his human kindness, had told her all.

"He won't die, my dear lady," he had said. "I feel sure of that. He will get over it, and live to be strong again. But--yes, you must be brave about it, and more than that, you must help him to be brave, poor fellow."

This happened in the sitting-room adjoining. Sir Francis took a turn up and down before he went on. Then he sat in a chair just opposite Madge, and took her hands in his. And his grey eyes looked at her from under the eyebrows, which were grey also.

"Yes, you have got to make him brave," he repeated, "and there is your work cut out for you in the world. You are young and strong, and your youth and strength have got their mission now. Don't label me an old preacher; old I am, but I don't preach, Mrs. Dundas, unless I am sure of my audience. And I am sure of you. Your husband will get well. But his face will be terribly disfigured. That must be. That could not be helped. And there is another thing. He will be blind. Yes, yes, take the truth of that now, for it is you who have to enable him to bear it. Blind! Ah, my dear girl--I call you that: you are so young, and I am so sorry!"

* * * * *

How it had happened hardly interested her. They had been walking in line, it appeared, on the steep hill-side, where she had seen them as she sat on the top of the cliff above the Bridge-pool. Then a hare had got up, and Lord Ellington had fired. The shot struck a rock not far in front, and of the whole charge some ten pellets had ricocheted back and hit Evelyn in the face. One eye was destroyed, the other was so injured that it had been found impossible to save it; other pellets had lodged in his face. All this--the manner of the accident--did not matter to Madge: the thing had happened, it was only wonderful that he was alive.

But the operation--what it was Madge did not inquire, for it would do no good--had satisfied the surgeon. He could not have expected better results, he would not have predicted results so good. With the unhesitating obedience to duty, which is the motto and watchword of his profession, he had stopped in Lady Dover's house, waiting till he could without misgiving or fear of after-results, leave the case. All yesterday he had been in and out of the sick-room, he had slept in the dressing-room last night, and had only left an hour or two before, when he could put his patient into the skilled hands of the nurse who had come from Inverness. He was a kind, shy man, and fumbled dreadfully in his pockets as Lady Dover saw him off.

"You will do me a great service, Lady Dover," he had said, "if you will convey somehow to Mrs. Dundas that her debt to me, whatever it is, is discharged. Discharged it is; to see a woman being brave is sufficient. Besides, I am on my holiday: I could not think of taking a fee. So if so absurd a notion occurs to her--ah, the motor is ready, I see, but if so absurd a thing occurs--you, my dear lady, will please exercise your tact, you will let her be under no obligation, please. A Daimler surely--beautiful machines, are they not--yes, just a little tact--I was in the house or something--I am sure you will manage it--besides, on my holiday. Yes, good-bye, good-bye. I think I have told the nurse everything, and the doctor from Inverness--dear me, his name has gone again, whom I am very pleased to have met, is, I am sure, most reliable. God bless my soul, poor Dundas, a rising painter too; well, I'm no judge. But it is pitiful, isn't it? Of course, if I am wanted again, I'll step over at once: Brora, you know, it's no trouble at all. And the poor fellow, too, who caused this accident; I'm sorry for him, too--nobody's fault. But tell him we'll pull Mr. Dundas through--oh, yes, we'll pull him through, and there's Braill's system and all afterwards. A brave woman, you know, Mrs. Dundas is; does one good, that sort of woman. Very brave. She'll need to be, poor thing, too. Good-bye, good-bye."

But Evelyn lay still, and there was no need for Madge to ring for the nurse. Sometimes he shifted his head from side to side, and occasionally he put a hand up to the bandage that covered his face, with little moans and sighs below his breath. Madge had been warned to be on the alert for this, and very gently, as often as he did this, she would take the feeble, wandering fingers in hers and lay his arm back again on the blanket. It was something even to have that to do, the slightest, most trivial act, was a relief from absolute inaction. Yet all the time she dreaded with ever-increasing shrinking of the heart the hour when she should have to act indeed, when her husband would come to, and begin to ask questions. No one but she, she was determined, should answer them; it was she who would tell him all that he had yet to learn. Would it kill him, she wondered, when he knew? Would he die simply because life was no longer desirable or possible? Blind! Madge could not fully grasp that herself yet, but she felt she must realise it, she must make haste to realise it before she was called upon to tell him. Lady Dover, her mother, Sir Francis, had all urged her to let him be told by someone else; but Madge would not hear of it; some wifely instinct was stronger than any reason that could be suggested.