Scene II.--SKETCH

He sette not his benefice to hire, And lette his shepe acombred in the mire, And ran unto London, unto Seint Poules, To seken him a chanterie for soules, Or with a brotherhede to be withold; But dwelt at home, and kepte wel his fold.--_Chaucer_.

Dr. Berry never learnt whether any phenomena occurred within or around the Manor of Thorlund immediately subsequent to that evening when he had been constrained to issue his warnings, because Reed came no more to the rectory. The scholar reasoned that it was not any feeling of indignation which kept the so called master of the Strath away; nor was it fear lest he might be compelled to listen to more ominous forebodings; it was, more probably, shame at defeat.

The gate which admitted from the churchyard was open to the rector no longer; but every day he passed along the front, both at morning and evening, anxious to see if the work of demolition had been commenced, and from each of these walks he returned with the same triumphant smile. Not a tuft of grass had been mown, nor had the axe been laid at the root of any of the elms; not a bush had been removed, not a flower or weed uprooted. The garden remained unaltered in all outward essentials, except that a pathway had become beaten out from the iron gates to the bridge across the moat.

When the rector questioned sexton or shepherd he learnt what he might have guessed, namely that the owner hardly ever left the place; that he had given up searching for men to work there; that he lived alone, attending to his own requirements in colonial fashion; that his baggage had been brought from the distant station across the hills and taken by the carrier into the house; and the tradesmen of the small market town seven miles away had been instructed to call for orders not more than once a week.

“Will he also become a dreamer?” the scholar wondered, as he gazed longingly upon the old grey wall. “Can it be possible for the Strath to give him a soul and take him to itself as it received me? Will his poultry farming become poetry making after all?”

He laughed sleepily at the quaint idea and approaching the oak door turned the handle and pushed timidly. He had done so every evening since Reed had left him, hoping rather than expecting to feel the barrier yield. It was the same then as upon other nights; the door was locked.

During the tension of that long week, when the garden was closed to him, Dr. Berry for the first time realised the loneliness of the Thorlund valley.

His single churchwarden, a peasant farmer who signed his name with difficulty and without legibility, had his dwelling place almost a mile from the church. The nearest gentlefolk lived four miles away at Kingsmore across the white road of the downs. The only houses in the valley were the rectory and the Strath. Half ruined barns, standing in a disused yard which sloped towards a pond where sheep were sometimes scoured, hedges, grass-roads, and a triangular green where a whipping-post was preserved, comprised the remainder of the hamlet. In such a place the talented Greek scholar had been content to pass his time upon earth.

The rector found himself using that past tense unconsciously while he mourned for his lost Eden. After thirty years of a strange sleep he felt stirring within him a desire for more breadth and motion and some human sympathy. The small voice of the world was calling him; the natural human passions, long latent and drugged by the influence which had dominated his life, struggled to reach the surface. The sluggish calm had been disturbed by expulsion from the garden. He had entered there to dream; and now that the gate was closed he became conscious of the thorns and thistles of the world.

This restless mood grew upon the scholar as the days passed, the long dry days of midsummer when the spirit of comedy prevailed around him. His belief in the ultimate triumph of destiny was as deeply-rooted as that of any ancient Greek. The Strath had long ago suggested to him the theatre with its rites and mysteries and the open stage where characters came and went, speaking their messages through either the comic or the tragic mask. He himself represented the chorus, and had merely played his part of exarchus in warning Reed. He did not require to turn to his Aeschylus, or to his Sophocles, to learn the fate of that man who thinks himself strong enough to fight destiny. Reed’s fate was fixed, as assuredly as Agamemnon was doomed to death when he returned to his palace in Argos. But destiny must strike with mortal weapons; and it was impossible to believe that any human instrument in the neighbourhood of sleepy Thorlund could be so wrought upon as to strike the fatal blow.

Although the scholar had never been a sociable being, he felt it a relief when Mr. Price, vicar and squire of Kingsmore, rode over on the Saturday and invited himself to lunch. This reverend neighbour was a simple-minded man of seventy, bow-legged with much riding, hearty in manner, an excellent judge of beasts, and somewhat of a connoisseur in wine. He would shout a jest at every rustic, and touch his disreputable hat to every dame in his village, address his labourers as equals, and throw coppers to the children who passed him as he rode. He had long ago forgotten what little learning he had acquired; and it was to be feared that, good man though he was, his farming interests were not infrequently placed in front of his spiritual duties. He could indicate all the good points in a horse at a glance; but it might be doubted whether he could have quoted verbatim any one of the thirty-nine articles.

“Good-day to you, Berry,” he shouted in his hearty manner, as he crossed the rectory lawn while his dogs hunted the scholar’s cat into the shrubberies. “I was saying to myself this morning that it was a long time since I had eaten roast beef at your table, and as I know you have a sirloin on Saturdays I thought I would ride over and help with the under-cut. So the owner of the manor has turned up at last. My village is full of families with his name. The place was a swamp originally, I’m told, and they say the name came into existence on account of the number of reeds which grew there. Any truth in that, do you think? I believe in tradition. It’s the only thing I do believe in nowadays. If your squire turns out to be connected with our Reeds, as they say he is, I’m afraid he won’t be much of an acquisition.”

“He is connected,” said Dr. Berry. “However you may be able to agree with him better than I can ever hope to do,” he went on with unintentional maladroitness. “He has actually proposed to me a plan for altering the Strath and breeding poultry there.”

“God bless my soul,” exclaimed his brother cleric, pushing an end of his soiled white tie beneath his collar. “There’s no money to be made out of poultry in this part of the world. I can’t dispose of mine so as to cover expenses. He should go in for pigs. I’ll call on him after luncheon, and tell him there’s money to be made in pigs. I have some good sows for sale.”

“Pigs!” murmured Dr. Berry in anguish. “Pigs at the Strath!”

“They ought to do well,” said the farmer-vicar of Kingsmore. “There’s plenty of grass at the manor, and pigs do well on grass. Ah, you’re afraid of the smell. But pigs don’t smell, if they are properly kept. We will call on Mr. Reed this afternoon. I am very anxious to see the inside of the place.”

“I cannot accompany you,” said the rector of Thorlund a trifle coldly. “Mr. Reed and I have not made any considerable advance towards friendship.”

“That won’t do,” said the other, shaking his head seriously. “You must pull it off with your squire, even if you do have to lower yourself a bit. You and he are alone here, and when two men are cast upon a desert island they can’t afford to quarrel. Now I’m quite prepared to call on Mr. Reed, and be friendly, though he is distantly connected, I suspect, with my head-carter. Every man is a vote, as my dear uncle, who was member for this division under Lord Derby’s administration, used to say; by which he meant, I fancy, that every man can do you either good or harm, and you may as well earn the good at the sacrifice of a little pride. But look here, Berry. For the hundredth time I want to know whether things are as they should be at the manor?”

The scholar smiled somewhat feebly as he replied, “Is it possible that everything should be in order with a house that has stood deserted for a century?”

“You know what I mean,” said Mr. Price. “I have asked you many a time if the place is haunted, and I have never been satisfied with your answers. I believe in haunted houses, because I once owned a farm which was troubled by a tiresome old woman in a plaid shawl and a poke bonnet, and I had to pull the house down to get rid of her. You have always declared that the manor is free from anything of that sort; but I think there must be something you have kept from me.”

“Come indoors,” said the doctor. “It is hot out here, and dinner will soon be ready. I will tell you what I know about the Strath.”

The old gentleman followed his reverend brother into the study, and seating himself beside the window listened to what he had to say, his white head on one side, and his eyes blinking incredulously.

“Berry,” he said gravely, when his mind had been sufficiently perplexed. “If this is what our progress has brought us to I am glad I am nearly seventy-one. I have always said that the world is going ahead too fast. When I was a boy we lived very much the same as they did a couple of thousand years before, and then in just fifty years the whole world changed. First came steam, and after it the telegraph and electricity, and now we have reached a stage when we can send a message from one end of the earth to the other in about the time it takes to write it, and hear the voices of dead men speaking out of phonographs, and we are talking of travelling a hundred miles in the hour, and there is no hell and very little fear of death nowadays, and--God bless my soul! we can’t even have a respectable ghost, but our old houses are to be haunted for the future by this electricity and magnetism; and they say messages are coming from people who are dead and ought to be decently at rest, and we are learning something about the next stage of existence, and a future state can be proved, we are told, not through the Bible, which was good enough for everyone in my young days, but by certain phases of human consciousness which I refuse to believe in and don’t profess to understand, and--I’m very glad I shan’t live much longer.”

“There is surely nothing much older than the idea of a house permeated with some essence of mystery,” the scholar continued quietly. “Read again your Greek drama, and refresh your memory by the references of Aeschylus to the palace of Argos, whence odours issued like the breath of graves. There you have a house, haunted, to use your word, like the Strath by an inexplicable and invisible presence working its influence upon the affairs of men.”

“You go beyond me,” said Mr. Price perplexedly. “I never could translate Aeschylus, and the only way I got through at Oxford was by learning the crib by heart and getting the selection right by luck. I always thought it a waste of time to learn Greek, and I think so still. Give a boy a good commercial education. Teach him French and German, and elementary science, and American methods. Give him a chance to make his way in the world.”

“And deprive him of the finest literature of all time, and the knowledge of human nature as it is revealed to us through the classics,” added the scholar quietly. “Is that fair?”

“Bah,” said Mr. Price. “There are always translations if they are wanted, and there are Shakspere and our grand old Bible.”

“Shakspere could only model his tragedies upon the Greek drama,” the scholar protested. “All that he could do was to clothe the old thoughts with his own unrivalled speech and introduce additional characters and scenic effects. The dark thread of influence runs through all his tragedies. We know from the outset that Lear must die, that Hamlet must fail, that Othello must fall through his frightful error. As for the Bible permit me, with all reverence, to say that much of its early lore is apocryphal, and much more of later date derived from the thinkers and writers of ancient Greece. You talk of sustaining your student with stagnant water taken far from the fountain head.”

“I never could argue with you,” said Mr. Price sadly. “You swim right away, while I sink like a stone. Though I am an old-fashioned Englishman I do my best to be modern. I have recently bought a mechanical foster-mother to rear my poultry, I have stocked my farm with American implements, and now I’m seriously thinking of employing gramaphones to frighten the pigeons from my peas. It’s no use trying to fight progress, as the savage who charged a locomotive discovered, and destiny, or whatever you call the thing that is haunting the manor, will find that out. This Reed comes from America. If I were a betting man, I would lay you what you like that he will improve the place according to his plans, and clear away that atmosphere which you say has settled over it. The Strath wants a thunderstorm to freshen its air, and I wouldn’t mind wagering that the American will play the part of thunderstorm to perfection.”

“If I were a betting man, to borrow your expression, I would take you,” rejoined Dr. Berry with a strained smile. “But now let us go and eat our beef.”

“Talking of thunder-storms,” said the squarson of Kingsmore, as he followed his host into the dining-room. “I am reminded that the glass was falling very rapidly when I left home, so I shall pay my call upon friend Reed and get away as quickly as possible.”