Scene V.--PAGEANT

Toss fortune back her tinsel and her plume, And drop this mask of flesh behind the scene.--_Young_.

The two dwellers in the Strath went on dreaming. Drayton had reserved a small ante-chamber leading out from the saloon for his work-room. Here the escutcheon of the mask was endlessly repeated in wood, plaster, and copper; a pinched tragic face was represented, crest-like, upon the picture frames, and along the cornice. And it was here that the tragic influence of the house was felt more strongly than elsewhere.

The day was grey. The sun had shone little of late; and a moist wind carried restlessly through the garden. The playwright sat nursing a volume which served him for a desk. He appeared in good health, although his eyes had a trick of roving, and at times he would shudder as though with cold. He believed that he had never been so well in his life, and this opinion was shared by Conway, who was lying in the saloon, listening to his friend. The journal that he loved was lying open upon a cushion before him. The draperies which divided the two rooms were fastened back, and when the enraptured voice came louder to his ears Conway put back his head and laughed in sheer happiness as he heard the noisy sophistry of the writer:

“I cannot conceive a Deity who finds pleasure in tragedy. The Creator must understand and appreciate comedy. If there be the divine frown, there must be also the divine laughter. I am assured that the Sublime would rather see a wine-skin dressed out in child’s clothes than the lion-hide and the club; and rather hear the quack of the frog-souls against the Acherusian lake than those anguished cries in the grove of the Eumenides. If that be so, let us have no more tragedy. Let us grow wings and fly to Cloudcuckootown, and take a bird’s eye view across mortality.”

“Before you attempt to fly, be sure that your wings will bear you,” called Conway, also speaking in the spirit of ancient comedy. “The nearer the sun the greater the effort; and if you fall there may be no Icarian sea to receive you.”

“Give me a theme, and I will set to work upon it,” cried the enraptured Drayton.

“Listen then,” said Conway, picking up the journal. “Take a well known theme. In old fields we gather fresh flowers, and new learning may be found in the oldest tales.” Then he went on thus to read:

“Can there be anything more bitter than solitude? This morning I was driven out by my aching tongue to speak to nature. I called to the flowers, and they were silent. I cried to the birds, and they chattered, but not to me. I whispered to the stream, and it murmured, but not to me. The eyes I saw in that water were not those you have in your memory, my fair-haired love. I spoke to the trees, to the wind, to the clouds, and despairingly to God. The trees whispered, and the wind murmured, but not for me; the clouds drifted on; and God remained more silent than any of the wonders He has made.

“The prisoner in the Fleet has consolations which I may not share. He may wrangle with his turnkey concerning fees, or argue with his fellows in misfortune. I have nothing, but memory and faith. There is a place for me in this world, and I may not fill it; a love, and I may not have it; a life, and I may not enter into it; one voice above all others, and I may not hear it. This is to be in prison indeed.

“You will wonder, Geoffrey, should this little book in time to come be brought into your hands, why I did not escape from this misery, before death, like some kindly nurse, snatched me from my play-things and put me to my bed. Let me answer you. The roads are watched, not only against your coming, but against my going. I know that silent men follow me. Were I to enter a coach, I should be dragged down. Were I to steal forth some night, I should be seized, brought back by violence, and beaten for my effort.

“Sir John fears me, because I know too much concerning his two-faced life. Yet for my freedom I would promise anything, nay, I have promised, but ’tis of no avail. He knows that the caged bird is secure, but let that bird fly, and it will be seen no more. There is also another, more bitter reason. That it is which now tears out my heart. My uncle, miser and parson of Queensmore, told me, with a grin and a screwing up of his pig-like eyes, that you were lately taken by the press. That pitiless and cunning wolf my father set the plot to be rid of you. May God alone forgive him.

“Is it true? While I write these words are you far upon the seas, shamefully degraded and abused? You could not have kept from me a whole year. You would have found a way, for love laughs at swords, and knows no fear, and has no sense of bodily pain. You have gone far from me, and I am left with a sad last hope that someone will be found to tell you I was true. My final breath shall be in prayer that you may be brought some day into Thorlund, to stand upon a cold stone marking the spot where I shall be in silence. Do not be afraid, Geoffrey, even though it be night and a wild wind beating; for your mind shall not be troubled and you shall see no ghostly sight. You will know I did myself no harm.

“Would that I might leave you something, a ribbon, a lock of hair, a ring. Why, so I will. None but old Deborah shall handle this small white body when I am wrung out of it, and she will do my bidding yet. Our vault lies beneath the chancel. You have but to shut yourself in the church during the night, raise the great stone beside the wall--’tis graven with the Hooper arms, surmounted by a cross fimbriated--and descend the stone steps. Beloved, do not be afraid. I shall be loving you still, and I may be nearer than you think. If a light breath passes, call it not night wind. Upon my body you shall find the ring you gave me, and the lock of hair which now lies upon my forehead. Yet I have forgotten. My brain is wandering. How shall you discover this poor record of my daily life?

“The trees are white with dust, and the flowers wither. No rain has fallen for long, and the people who dwell upon the hills are hard put to it for water, and much sickness is, I hear, abroad. Mr. Blair takes his customary ease, smokes his long pipe, makes fishing-lines, and turns a deaf ear to the calls of the cottage folk. His duty begins and ends with his Sunday sermons, and these he is too idle or too ignorant to write himself. What a little charity there is in this great world! I can do nothing for the poor. I may not visit them, nor send one bottle of my father’s wine. Reed, who is the master of this house, keeps a sharp eye upon the household, and nothing goes out without his knowledge. ’Tis strange that my father should trust him, and none besides, but villainy acquaints a man with vile partners.

“To-day I met with Poor John, one who has lost his wits and roams about the country making verses. I see him often, at evening trapping sparrows in the ivy, at morning whistling beneath the elms, and at noon lying beside the stream to laugh at the image of his white face. He asked me for apples, as his custom is, but I could only tell him that all last year’s apples were done. Then he gave me a whistle, which he had made, and directed me to go into the woods and blow upon it, when I would immediately set all the birds a-singing. And so he left me grinning. Poor John do they call him? Why, he is far happier than I. I could envy this gentle madman. He views his surroundings through a weird atmosphere of imagination, and regards sane suffering men and women as underlings, and passes them in the belief that he is nature’s king, never knowing what a misshapen oaf he seems to them.

“It is exceeding hot. My brain aches and my eyes burn. This is my twentieth summer. I have lived a long time. You have been given and taken away; I mourn the loss and forget to be thankful for the gift. My books tell me nothing is left for a woman when the time of her love-making is passed. The man may still have his ambitions. He may attempt to follow in the steps of Mr. Pope, Mr. Garrick, Mr. Hogarth, or Mr. Fielding. He may serve his country, or aid the Pretender, winning scars and fame, as you may be doing while I write, my Geoffrey. But Miss Hooper, sad, and white, and shivering--what may she do? Nothing but sigh, and wait, and hope; and sighing kills, waiting maddens, and as for hope--why, hope is a fading flower. Oh, Geoffrey, cannot you send some small message through all this darkness, something to tell me that you live? Cannot you make a sign? I listen in the night for the movement of your spirit, or the echo of your mind. Ought I not to feel your heart longing for me? I hear only the night throbbing, the insects murmuring, the house creaking, and beyond there is cold pitiless space half-lit by stars. The daffodils were glorious this year, Geoffrey. They filled the plantation with a light of gold, and yours was there, and I stood by it alone.”

The reader stopped, and a gentle movement came from the ante-room.

“There was a time when every living creature saw the bright side of things,” said the voice of Drayton. “Even when the human emotions were first represented upon the stage, it was believed that happiness ruled the world, until the philosophers discovered that whereas one play aroused the laughter of the audience another excited their compassion and their tears. Thereupon the drama became divided into its two great heads, known as the goat-song and the wine-song, the goat being the prize for tragedy, the wine for comedy. Comedy is the beginning of the story; tragedy is the end; there is only the difference of a letter between them. That which you have read seems to me to contain the germ of tragedy. When my modern drama, dealing with the life and death of George the Third, is completed I will give the world that story. The emotions are there,” he went on noisily. “I see light there, and it must be the phosphorescence of the dead which produces it.”

Conway joined the speaker. His face was pale, and his eyes shone with a mad light as he cried, “Let us remain here and work together. Let us discover the origin of love, and find the cause of its unhappy ending. Why does the glamour of life end when love has been satisfied?”

“Because of that satisfaction,” said the other character.

“That could never be so here.”

“There is a vast region outside,” said Drayton. “Love is here a religion; there a passion. Here desire becomes etherealised by possession, and consummation leads to higher things; there ambition, rivalries, and all the petty wedges of worldliness are driven in to love’s destruction. It ends in a tragedy there. It must end so, because of that finality. For every thing that knows an end is a tragedy.”

All the little tragic masks frowned at the spell-bound men, in copper and wood and plaster.

“There is no such thing as comedy at all.”

“Call the drama a knot,” said Drayton. “Call, the gradual unloosening of that knot comedy, the complete unfastening tragedy. The one deals with human beings, the other with actions. The light which falls upon the stage is constant, if difficult to discern. That light is not shed by religion, for religion is a superstition, and superstition is a flickering lamp which requires to be often recharged and changed. We live in the faintly glimmering region which lies outside, where there is no terror and no suffering, because we are spiritual. This state cannot be tragic, because it knows no ending.”

“Our minds demand an ending,” the other urged.

“When the body ceases to be material the mind will be unable to realise an ending,” said the man, who but a few weeks back had with difficulty made a living by writing snippets of nonsense for people of no intellect. “We are living in the half-light under these present conditions. It is the finest state we are capable of attaining while encumbered with the body.”

He leaned forward, parted the creepers, and holding them apart continued: “I perceive a woman walking in the garden. She is looking into the lilies beyond the topiary hedge. Her hair is dark, and her face tanned by exposure to the weather. Now she turns to me. There is a poetic gloom in her dark eyes.”

Before Drayton had done speaking he was alone. Conway had stepped into the garden. The creepers fell back across the window, the scribe’s fingers closed round the pencil, and he resumed his automatic labours.

It was Lone Nance who stood in the garden. She was often there, but the dreamers had not sighted her before, because she had hidden herself when she saw them coming. They had heard a singing voice during the still evenings, but had given it no heed. What was it to them if the nightingale sang old ballads, and the blackcap madrigals, so long as the songs were in tune with the influence?

He, who was called the master of the Strath, reached the yew hedge, and discovered the girl scraping moss from a long low stone. She looked up at him fearlessly with large eyes lightly blurred with tears.

“Why do you kneel beside that stone?” Conway muttered, not venturing to remove his eyes lest the vision should disappear. “And why are there tears in your eyes?”

The girl put out her hand and held up the speckled and stiffened body of a thrush, which had been smitten by some hawk and had tumbled into the garden to die in the dust.

“The birds come to the Strath to die,” she said. “I will not bury it, for there may still be life in its little brain. I will let it lie upon the stems of this long grass, where the wind shall rock it up and down, and the sun shall warm it, until the little body may forget that it is dead.”

“Why are you scraping the moss off that stone?” he urged.

“I was running on the hills when a voice stopped me and called me into the valley,” she answered.

“I did not hear it,” he said.

“At sunset there is always a voice, like music melting in the air,” she said. “You must make no sound, or you will not hear it. He hears it.” She nodded in the direction of the rectory.

“What is that stone? Why is it broken across the middle?”

“This stone cries out, and the house answers it,” went on the girl in a low voice. “Lives and hearts have been broken here. He was young and he was beautiful. As they carried him past the gates into the garden he sighed once and that was all. They buried the body here that night, and covered the grave with a great stone taken from the stable-yard. But in the morning the stone was broken. The spirit had escaped in spite of them.”

“What was his name?” Conway asked.

“I do not know. His hair was fair, and his eyes were blue. I have seen him walking with the lady of the white lilies.”

She stroked the stone. Her hand was a deep brown, bearing marks of bramble scratches, and the fingers were delicate. Her head was small. There were white seeds of grass held in its thick dark hair. She was strong and healthy, this wild girl.

“I have never been in there,” she said, pointing towards the house.

“Come with me,” said Conway. Holding the girl’s hand, he led her through the garden, across the moat, into his home, and left her at length beside the door of what had been Miss Hooper’s room. “This is your place,” he said quietly. “You will find here all that you can require.”

But there still existed a gross world of evil-thinking outside the influence, and there was materialism even within the Strath. Early in the afternoon the crone of the kitchen accosted the master, as he walked in a state of innocence, and stated her intention of quitting the place forthwith. The influence had left her absolutely untouched; she had no laughter to give, nor shudder to spend. But she could not tolerate the presence of Lone Nance; and if the girl were to remain she, the speaker, would go, and that immediately, even to the work house and her pauper’s coffin.

Conway could not understand, nor was he able to reason with the rachitic dame, who insisted upon dragging the custom of another world into his paradise. Why this turmoil because another character had been added to the drama? He did not know why she should seek to disturb his state of peace. There were the iron gates in all visibility; she might so easily walk off the stage. The birds did not first come to him, and scold noisily, if they intended to fly away.

“Human nature has many phases,” observed the philosophic Drayton, when the respectable dame came and appealed to him. “One well-defined trait is a longing after change.” Then he gravely handed her the Ethics of Aristotle, and bade her study the pages for her soul’s good.

Finally the poor muddy-minded creature became appeased, not through the wisdom of Aristotle, nor yet by the indifference of her masters, but owing to the natural passing of her indignation after the noisy assertion of her wrongs. She returned to the kitchen, after a manner mollified, to grope grumbling among the pots, and to prepare the evening meal which differed not from day to day.

That same evening rumour went rustling into Kingsmore, where the relations of Lone Nance lived, and charges were brought against Conway, as gross as they were false, while wiseacres nodded heads of clay and recalled predictions made by them aforetime. They had seen the squire of Thorlund at the fair, and had written him down a fellow of the baser sort. They exhorted the lone girl’s guardians to take immediate action; but these practical folk merely realised that there was no longer a superfluous mouth to feed and an irresponsible spirit to suppress. Only one old man was sage enough to say, “No harm will come to her if she is at the Strath.” To those who reminded him of Henry Reed’s fate the grandfather replied, “He set himself against the place.”

When Dr. Berry came into the garden at his accustomed time he discovered a young woman, dressed in the mode of the eighteenth century, selecting blooms from the rose-bushes. He bent his head courteously and passed without a word.

The night fell, close, humid, and dark. There was not a breath of wind to move the heavy clouds which obliterated space and its starlight. Through a mist hanging about he garden beamed the light of a single candle, set beside the stone under the topiary hedge. The long yellow flame rose like an ear of wheat, and only flickered when a moth darted into it. There was a sound of music in the house, and presently the chorus reached the garden, and loomed into the misty radiance of the candlelight. First came Nance, grave and self-possessed, her head bare, her hands full of white roses; then Drayton and Conway; and finally Dr. Berry. They were holding sprigs of rosemary gathered from the herb-garden.

They took their stand about the stone, and when the girl had covered it with her roses the exarchus recited the office of the dead. The garden was steeped in silence outside the halo of light. The window of the saloon could be seen faintly glowing in the distance, but the outlines of the house were lost.

The Dithyramb was sung and the chorus marched away, leaving the solemn candle to burn itself away among the blooms. The Bacchanalians sat down to eat and to drink, but there was no sound of laughter, nor any careless word. The mind of the house was grim.

The procession made its way out the second time, Dr. Berry leading. Behind him came Conway and Drayton carrying iron bars and chisels. They passed the gate leading into the churchyard. Beneath a drip-stone terminating in a diabolic face, at the west end of the building, the scholar left them and went to his house for the key. The atmosphere continued to be dense; not a sound was heard, except the squeaking of bats, and the cry of a nightjar.

When the heavily clamped door had been opened, the three men passed into the mouldy interior. The rector locked the door, lighted one of the chancel lamps, and indicated a long stone let into the tiles, beneath the north wall of the building; and, when the others hesitated, he snatched the bar from Conway’s nervous hands and forced its point into the mortar which crumbled in the crevice.

A canopied memorial, adorned by miniature fluted columns and capitals of spiral volutes, acanthus-leaf bosses, brackets of decorated foliage, grape pendants, and crotchets terminating in mitre-head finials, had been let into the chancel wall, where a marble slab lyingly recited virtues of dead and gone Hoopers. There was no mention of Sir John, nor of his wife Edith, nor of his daughter Winifred; and the parish registers dealing with their period had been destroyed by carelessness and by fire. The baronet, as was well known, had been buried in unconsecrated ground. The stone which closed the entry to the vault was soft and much chipped. The cement crumbled at a touch. Conway, who had joined the work in fearful expectancy, felt the slab heave. Another moment it came up, and they could hear the hollow sound made by fragments of mortar falling into the vault below.

A step appeared, dry and dusty, and when a candle was brought and lowered they discerned a narrow flight leading into the silent space. Dr. Berry was the first to descend, and Conway the last. A brick arch sloped over them, and on either side appeared stout shelves, supporting narrow berths where the bodies of the extinct family had been put aside like old garments in a press.

“This is the one,” the scholar whispered, raising the candle above his head, and tapping a worm-eaten plank which gave forth a hollow echo.

“Died December 12th, aged 20,” muttered Conway.

“Let us see whether her lover came to her,” the scholar murmured.

There was nothing terrible about those swathed remains. Only a lock of fair hair, which had escaped from its bonds somehow, glistened when the candlelight entered the coffin. What had been little white hands were folded; and between them Conway perceived a tiny packet, bound with white ribbon, and inscribed with one word “Geoffrey.” He put out his hand, but shrank, afraid to rob the dead.

“It was never meant for me,” he whispered.

“Nevertheless take it,” urged the rector. “She does not need it now.”

Conway put out his arm, but again the effort failed. The packet was retained jealously, and the grave-breaker had neither the courage nor the inclination to use force. He turned away quickly, and sought the steps, muttering as he escaped, “She will not let it go.”

“I wished to bury it beneath the stone where her lover lies,” murmured Dr. Berry, as he also turned away. “But she knows what is best.”

As they replaced the stone, the light went out. Velvety darkness, heavy as cobwebs, closed down, submerging them, leaving them standing as it were upon the bottom of the sea of space. Then Drayton spoke:

“A current of cold air passed me. It was going from east to west.”

“It passed me also,” said the rector. “And I could see its outline and its eyes.”