Scene I.--SATIRIC

Bah! I do hate bainting and boetry.--_King George II_.

The influence changed, as was usual at the approach of darkness. The power compelling them forth became irresistible. It was a new sensation for the scholar, but his sensitive nature suggested that the resentful force was directed against his companion, and not against himself. He extinguished the candles and walked lingeringly to the hall door, following Reed who had escaped into the twilight of the garden, having no desire to explore further that night. Nor had the owner any intention then of sleeping in the house. He had indeed when proposing it to himself forgotten that every room would be buried deep in dirt. When the scholar joined him with a hospitable invitation to the rectory he accepted gladly. They passed together towards the iron gates.

A few country folk had assembled upon the road, to discuss that great event the opening of the gates of the Strath. One man stood leaning upon an iron bar, which he had used at Reed’s request to force those gates apart. Their voices ceased when the rector was seen wading through the grass, and gnarled hands went up to pull gravely at the brims of dilapidated and picturesque headgear.

After having engaged two men for the next day, to wrench open doors and windows, to cut away the creepers, and to clear the interior from its accumulated dirt, Reed secured the chain, locked the padlock with his own hands, and giving a good night to the rustics turned away. For a hundred yards not a word was spoken, then Reed pulled himself upright, and brushed the dust from his heavy beard.

“It’s all nonsense,” he said roughly, and his companion shrank at the change in the stranger’s voice and manner. “It’s sheer folly to suppose that the Strath is different from any other old place, apart, of course, from the fact that it has not been inhabited within the recollection of living man. I’m just thinking I may have made a fool of myself when we were in that garden, Professor. I don’t know what possessed me. I’m a practical man, level-headed as the best of ’em ordinarily, but in there I felt--well, I’m not much of a talker, and hang me if I can explain it, but I felt as if I had taken a little more drink than I could manage. I might have been playing a part. Ah, that’s it! I might have been an actor, spouting words that some other fellow had written down for me.”

“You need not explain,” said the rector gently. “I can enter into your feelings.”

“Well, I’m going to change all that,” went on Reed. “I’ll clean the place out from cellar to attic, sell off the old stuff, get in some decent furniture, tear down the creepers, cut the garden up, sell the hay for what it is worth, and get the place into as good shape as I can afford. I mean to start a small poultry farm and make a bit that way. I come from America, Professor, and I’m not afraid of work. Lucky I’m not, for I reckon it will take all my time to get that garden into anything like order this summer.”

The rector shuddered. The stranger had chanced indeed now that the influence of the Strath had loosened its hold upon him.

“You said you would not alter the place,” he reminded him quietly.

“Did I say so?” Reed answered with a hoarse laugh. “Well, I must have been crazy. I’m not in a position to spend money, but I’ll soon show you what one pair of hands can do. Before autumn you won’t recognise the rotten old property. I shall start with the house to-morrow, and when that is clean I’ll root up the bushes, drain the moat, and go for in fruit and poultry.”

“The Strath will not let you,” the rector cried.

“What’s that?” said Reed.

“You are not strong enough to fight the place,” replied the rector boldly.

Reed regarded his companion with open-mouthed astonishment, and presently his beard began to wag with laughter. “’Scuse me, Professor,” he said. “Hope you haven’t got the idea into your head that it is not legal for a man to make his own house habitable? I tell you what it is,” he went on in his blunt fashion. “You have lived out of the world too long, and have roamed around that old wilderness of mine until you have picked up some queer notions. Wait until I show you how to breed turkeys.”

Then Dr. Berry realised that he hated this little bearded man who had come to destroy his happiness. He wished with all his heart he had met him in the first instance outside the Strath and there discovered his true character. Had that happened he would assuredly never have invited him to the rectory. Gazing ahead at the wooden spire of his little church he said quickly:

“There is the rectory. You see I am a very near neighbour. I have always been accustomed to enter your garden by the churchyard, through that gate which you see yonder in the wall.”

Reed shrugged his shoulders, and, muttering into his beard, followed his host into the cool house.

A very plain supper was the evening meal at Thorlund rectory; and afterwards the poet sat in his garden to dream upon matters which were too great for him. That evening he brought two chairs upon the lawn. When they were seated Reed plunged at once into business and asked the rector if he could recommend a suitable housekeeper and a man with some knowledge of poultry. “Poultry and poetry sound a bit alike, eh, Professor?” he said jocosely. “But there’s a heap more money in my line than in yours.”

The rector shrank from the jest as from a blow. He answered the questions of his thick-skinned guest as fully as he could. Then, prompted by curiosity, he asked Reed how long the Strath had been in his family, and why it had remained desolate for so long.

The other pulled at his pipe with a frown, as though resenting the other’s natural desire for information. At last he put up his hand, stroked his beard, expectorated--again Dr. Berry shrank from him--and said:

“I don’t know much about yonder place. The Strath was owned in the first place by a family called Hooper. You can see their arms carved upon a stone over the entrance. They held the property until the middle of the eighteenth century. The owner was then a baronet who lived there alone. He was a pretty bad lot, I’ve been told, and was hanged at last for murdering his servant.”

“There was another and more serious charge against him, according to the opinion of a time when gentlemen were permitted to use their servants like dogs,” the rector interposed. “Sir John was certainly hanged, but it was for highway robbery. Local tradition declares that the rope which was used for his execution is now used for ringing the single bell of Thorlund church. If this statement were to be proved I should certainly have the rope removed. But I do not consider that it has been proved.”

“You know more about the Strath than I do. Perhaps you can tell me how it came by its queer-sounding name?” said Reed; and he raised his pipe to his mouth as a hint that the rector might proceed.

“About the name there is nothing remarkable,” came the answer. “Strath is a gaelic word signifying a broad valley. For a time, I have no doubt, the whole of this neighbourhood was known as the Strath; though glen, also a gaelic word and meaning a narrow valley, would have been more accurate nomenclature, as you may see for yourself by ascending one of the hills and looking down. There is an ancient, although undated, document among the parish records which alludes to the village of Strath hard by King’s Moor. The name of Thorlund, which means the sacred grove of Thor or the Thunder God, was at some later date attached to the hamlet, the name of Strath being retained by the manor house alone. But to return to the Hoopers. According to oral tradition, which I have generally found reliable, Sir John became a notorious highwayman after his wife’s death. It is said he had one child, a daughter who lived with him at the Strath, but whose name is not mentioned in the register of deaths. It is also said that he treated her most cruelly. Indeed, if report concerning him be true, Sir John was altogether bad, a robber and a drunkard in his country life, and when in town a habitual frequenter of the gaming houses which at that time were plentiful in the neighbourhood of St. James’s. Probably his midnight escapades upon the road were instituted to obtain money for the payment of debts thus contracted. One night Sir John was tracked to his house after a more daring venture than usual; his reeking mare was found in the stable; his body servant, one Thomas Reed, was discovered in the saloon mortally wounded, the baronet believing, it is supposed, that the man had informed upon him. The old fox had fled, having escaped by crawling out of an attic window and letting himself down the side of the house by means of the creepers, but he was found that same night hiding in a hollow tree. In due course he was hanged. What happened to the daughter I have never been able to discover.”

“I suppose you want to know how we came into the property. You will have guessed I am a descendant of the murdered servant,” said Reed. “Well, I’ll tell you. The Strath doesn’t legally belong to me. It is, or it was, Crown property. But as by some oversight, the Crown never seized it, the Reeds did. They were on the spot, you see, and when they saw the place was abandoned they thought they would have compensation for Thomas’s murder, and so they stepped in. They were never turned out, and no questions were asked. But the Reeds were only village folk, and couldn’t afford to occupy the place. So they let it to a man named Biron who had spent most of his life in Germany. When he gave it up the Strath was taken by a family called Branscombe who for some reason left suddenly. It would be the last dinner party of the Branscombes that is still set out in that dining-room. Since their time not a soul--” he paused, then added with a grin, “I should say not a body, has entered the place until this evening.”

“But what have the Reeds been doing all these years?” asked the rector.

“They emigrated. My grandfather took no interest in the place. My father sent over enough money every year to satisfy the local rates, always hoping he would make enough to enable him to retire and come back and play the gentleman. The old man died twelve years ago at the age of eighty, and I went on with the business until it was ruined by a trust. Then I realised, and shipped back with the notion of spending the rest of my life at the Strath.”

“Were there no attempts made to let the property?”

“Not for the last fifty years,” Reed answered. “After the Branscombes left, and why they did so before their time I can’t tell you, the place had a bad reputation, and no one would go near it. But I have come at last,” he went on in his coarse voice which sounded unpleasantly through the garden. “I’ll soon clear away all that unhealthy nonsense. We Americans don’t hold with the conservatism of this old country, which makes everybody tumble into a trade error or a crazy belief one after the other, like sheep following the bell-wether through a hole in the fence. I’m not a gentleman in your sense, and I don’t pretend to be. I’m a practical man, the great-grandson of a farm labourer, and a free-thinker from my youth. I don’t believe in what you call occult influences, and if I can’t take up my quarters at the Strath and do what I like with the place I’ll eat my hat. And now, Professor,” Reed concluded in his familiar manner, “what do you say to a small glass of whisky?”

The rector rose without a word, and went into the house to find the bottle of spirits which he kept for use in an emergency; but while he groped in the cupboard there was a mist upon his eyes, and his usually gentle spirit was shaken with disgust and anger as he murmured, “He shall not lay a hand upon that garden. I hate the man. He has inherited my Paradise, and would take it from me and make it a desert.”

Early in the morning the visitor left for the Strath, entering the grounds by the gate in the churchyard, and the rector did not see him again until evening. He did not receive any invitation to accompany the master in these explorations; and the key, his property for the past thirty years, had been taken away. During the afternoon he walked along the front, noticed that the iron gates were ajar, and breathed more easily when he saw the long grass still waving in the wind. Returning, he fell in with one of the men in Reed’s employ, who touched his hat and would have walked on; but the rector stopped him and enquired what he had done.

“Opened the doors and windows in yonder, Sir,” said the man. “Some of they frames were that rotten they broke like paper. I scraped the dirt from the panes, and cut off nigh a truck-load of ivy to let in the light. But I ain’t going in there again, Sir.”

The rector asked for an explanation.

“Well, Sir, it’s what they’ve always said about the Strath,” the man went on, “It ain’t healthy in there. I don’t know whether ’tis because such a powerful lot of strong-smelling plants grow there, or what it is, Sir, but I do know a man can’t help making a fool of hisself when he’s there. I was a-laughing and a-singing while I worked, and feeling just as though I was tipsy, though, as you know, I’m a sober man, Sir, and when I looked inside there was this Mr. Reed laughing at summat like to hurt hisself, and I don’t know if you’ll believe me, Sir, but I saw him join ’ands with Bill Vyner, and them two danced round the room, kicking up the dust awful. They seemed to be fair enjoying of themselves, Sir, but now I come to think quiet-like it was a horrid kind of sight, though I liked it well enough at the time, and stood in the door whistling a tune for them to dance to. You see, Sir, it ain’t proper for a gentleman like Mr. Reed to be so familiar with such as me and Bill. And Bill says he ain’t going there no more neither.”

Dr. Berry resumed his walk with a dreamy smile upon his handsome face. His sensitive mouth quivered as he repeated the famous satire of Archilochus addressed to his own soul. “Nature does not change,” he murmured. “The lampoons of Archilochus caused the daughters of Lycambes to hang themselves for shame. How will the influence of the Strath use Henry Reed?”

It was twilight when the man came to the rectory, sullen and discontented. He had little information to give, and when the doctor enquired whether the work of restoration had begun he curtly replied, “Not yet,” and went on to ask whether he might spend another night under the parsonage roof.

“I will try him,” said the rector to himself when they had supped; and going to his study he extracted from a drawer his little manuscript book of translations. “I will see if this man has a soul which can respond to the unseen world. If so there is a chance for him; if not the Strath must conquer.”

He came out upon the lawn where his guest was chewing the stem of his pipe restlessly.

“Allow me to read you a translation of mine,” he said; then seating himself a little behind his guest he read the description of peaceful night written by Alcman the Lydian slave and poet, who lived and sang a hundred years before Daniel interpreted the writing on the wall for the lord of Babylon.

As the poet concluded, dropping his musical voice to a whisper over the last iambic, he drew forward, watching and excited, his own spirit thrilled by the magic of those lines. Reed appeared to be abstracted; with wild hope the scholar put out his hand and touched him.

“Oh, done?” muttered the bearded man. “Queer, fellows should waste their time writing that stuff, ain’t it? Suppose they’re good for nothing else though. I was thinking while you were talking that what my place wants is better air. It’s too much shut in, you see, and no one can live without lots of fresh air. I shall cut down the elms along the road. It will be all profit to me, as the timber is big, and ought to sell at a good price. Have you any idea what figure elm is fetching now?”

The rector groaned as he pushed the book of treasures into his pocket. He had been prepared to follow up any success he might have gained by reciting a song of Arion, who, the legends say, was brought into Taenarum on the backs of dolphins. But his test had failed. The man beside him was base earth, with a mind impervious to the world’s music.

“Will you permit me to say something?” he asked nervously.

Reed swung his head round, and his small eyes twinkled maliciously.

“Whatever you like, Professor. I can guess what it is. You want me to spare those trees. Well, I tell you right now they must go.”

“I do not ask you to spare the trees,” said Dr. Berry earnestly. “The genius of the place can take care of them. I am going to entreat you to save yourself.”

“What?” ejaculated Reed. He frowned and crumpled his beard. “What foolery in this?” he muttered testily.

“You will not understand me,” the scholar went on. “You laugh at my warnings. Remember I have studied the Strath for thirty years. It has been kind to me, and more than kind, because there is sympathy between us. We are both dreamers. I have been the sole character of its drama all these years. I have tried to be its friend, and it has regarded me as such. But you--you are opposing it. You are its enemy.”

Reed dropped his pipe and planted each hand firmly upon his knees.

“I’m an ignorant man from your point of view,” he said in a grating voice. “I can’t write or talk about busy bees forgetting their daily toil and feathered tribes hanging their drooping wings, and I’ll be hanged if I want to. I can go better than that, Professor. Put you and me down in the world to live by wits, and I would build up a business, while you would sink to the poor-house. Ignorance? Well, maybe. Have you ever heard of a millionaire who could read Greek? I don’t follow you in your talk about dreams and warnings, and if you will excuse my saying so I don’t intend to listen to any more of it. If you have any suggestion to make about the property I’ll be glad to listen. But when you say that a man can’t live on his own place because it has taken a dislike to him--well, Professor. It’s moonshine.”

“Explain to me one thing,” Dr. Berry urged.

“Tell me how it was when I came upon you in the garden yesterday evening you were as different from your present self as my house is different from the Strath?”

Reed stirred uncomfortably. That question rankled.

“If we were sitting in that garden now,” impressed the rector, taking his mild revenge, “and I were to read you those lines of Alcman, which you despise, you would listen eagerly. Explain why your mood should be different there?”

“Maybe it is you that change,” suggested the other unamiably.

“Come into the garden with me now.”

But Reed declined emphatically.

“You and I have got to be friends, Professor,” he went on with attempted heartiness. “You’re the parson and I’m the squire, and it seems there is no one handy to act as peacemaker. We had better not quarrel, and if we are not going to quarrel we must agree to differ.”

“I have done my duty,” said the rector quietly.

“I had to warn you that if you insist upon opposing the Strath you will be made to suffer. If you refuse to be persuaded I cannot help you.”

Reed stretched out for the bottle and helped himself generously.

“How in the name of common sense can I be made to suffer?” he muttered; but there was in his voice for the first time a definite note of awe.

“There will come upon you the last punishment which can befall any man,” Dr. Berry answered.

“The Strath will destroy you.”

Then he removed his hat and wiped his forehead; and walked slowly into the house.