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CHAPTER II - THE WAGER OF SQUIRE VANE
It was more than a month before the legend of the peacock
trees was again discussed in the Squire's circle. It fell out
one evening, when his eccentric taste for meals in the garden
that gathered the company round the same table, now lit with
a lamp and laid out for dinner in a glowing spring twilight.
It was even the same company, for in the few weeks intervening
they had insensibly grown more and more into each other's lives,
forming a little group like a club. The American aesthete
was of course the most active agent, his resolution to pluck
out the heart of the Cornish poet's mystery leading him again
and again to influence his flighty host for such reunions.
Even Mr. Ashe, the lawyer, seemed to have swallowed his
half-humorous prejudices; and the doctor, though a rather
sad and silent, was a companionable and considerate man.
Paynter had even read Treherne's poetry aloud, and he
read admirably; he had also read other things, not aloud,
grubbing up everything in the neighborhood, from guidebooks
to epitaphs, that could throw a light on local antiquities.
And it was that evening when the lamplight and the last daylight
had kindled the colors of the wine and silver on the table
under the tree, that he announced a new discovery.
"Say, Squire," he remarked, with one of his rare Americanisms,
"about those bogey trees of yours; I don't believe you know half the tales
told round here about them. It seems they have a way of eating things.
Not that I have any ethical objection to eating things," he continued,
helping himself elegantly to green cheese. "But I have more or less,
broadly speaking, an objection to eating people."
"Eating people!" repeated Barbara Vane.
"I know a globe-trotter mustn't be fastidious,"
replied Mr. Paynter. "But I repeat firmly, an objection
to eating people. The peacock trees seem to have progressed
since the happy days of innocence when they only ate peacocks.
If you ask the people here--the fisherman who lives on that beach,
or the man that mows this very lawn in front of us--they'll tell
you tales taller than any tropical one I brought you from the
Barbary Coast. If you ask them what happened to the fisherman Peters,
who got drunk on All Hallows Eve, they'll tell you he lost his way
in that little wood, tumbled down asleep under the wicked trees,
and then--evaporated, vanished, was licked up like dew by the sun.
If you ask them where Harry Hawke is, the widow's little son,
they'll just tell you he's swallowed; that he was dared to climb
the trees and sit there all night, and did it. What the trees did
God knows; the habits of a vegetable ogre leave one a little vague.
But they even add the agreeable detail that a new branch appears
on the tree when somebody has petered out in this style."
"What new nonsense is this?" cried Vane. "I know there's some crazy yarn
about the trees spreading fever, though every educated man knows why
these epidemics return occasionally. And I know they say you can tell
the noise of them among other trees in a gale, and I dare say you can.
But even Cornwall isn't a lunatic asylum, and a tree that dines on
a passing tourist--"
"Well, the two tales are reconcilable enough," put in the poet quietly.
"If there were a magic that killed men when they came close,
it's likely to strike them with sickness when they stand far off.
In the old romance the dragon, that devours people, often blasts
others with a sort of poisonous breath."
Ashe looked across at the speaker steadily, not to say stonily.
"Do I understand," he inquired, "that you swallow the
swallowing trees too?"
Treherne's dark smile was still on the defensive; his fencing always
annoyed the other, and he seemed not without malice in the matter.
"Swallowing is a metaphor," he said, "about me, if not about the trees.
And metaphors take us at once into dreamland--no bad place, either.
This garen, I think, gets more and more like a dream at this corner
of the day and night, that might lead us anywhere."
The yellow horn of the moon had appeared silently and as if
suddenly over the black horns of the seaweed, seeming to
announce as night something which till then had been evening.
A night breeze came in between the trees and raced stealthily
across the turf, and as they ceased speaking they heard,
not only the seething grass, but the sea itself move and sound
in all the cracks and caves round them and below them and on
every side. They all felt the note that had been struck--
the American as an art critic and the poet as a poet;
and the Squire, who believed himself boiling with an impatience
purely rational, did not really understand his own impatience.
In him, more perhaps than the others--more certainly than
he knew himself--the sea wind went to the head like wine.
"Credulity is a curious thing," went on Treherne in a low voice.
"It is more negative than positive, and yet it is infinite.
Hundreds of men will avoid walking under a ladder;
they don't know where the door of the ladder will lead.
They don't really think God would throw a thunderbolt at them
for such a thing. They don't know what would happen, that is
just the point; but yet they step aside as from a precipice.
So the poor people here may or may not believe anything;
they don't go into those trees at night."
"I walk under a ladder whenever I can," cried Vane,
in quite unnecessary excitement.
"You belong to a Thirteen Club," said the poet. "You walk under a ladder
on Friday to dine thirteen at a table, everybody spilling the salt.
But even you don't go into those trees at night."
Squire Vane stood up, his silver hair flaming in the wind.
"I'll stop all night in your tomfool wood and up your tomfool trees,"
he said. "I'll do it for twopence or two thousand pounds, if anyone
will take the bet."
Without waiting for reply, he snatched up his wide white hat and settled
it on with a fierce gesture, and had gone off in great leonine strides
across the lawn before anyone at the table could move.
The stillness was broken by Miles, the butler, who dropped
and broke one of the plates he carried. He stood looking
after his master with his long, angular chin thrust out,
looking yel-lower where it caught the yellow light of the lamp below.
His face was thus sharply in shadow, but Paynter fancied for
a moment it was convulsed by some passion passing surprise.
But the face was quite as usual when it turned, and Paynter
realized that a night of fancies had begun, like the cross
purposes of the "Midsummer Night's Dream."
The wood of the strange trees, toward which the Squire was walking,
lay so far forward on the headland, which ultimately almost
overhung the sea, that it could be approached by only one path,
which shone clearly like a silver ribbon in the twilight.
The ribbon ran along the edge of the cliff, where the single
row of deformed trees ran beside it all the way, and eventually
plunged into the closer mass of trees by one natural gateway,
a mere gap in the wood, looking dark, like a lion's mouth.
What became of the path inside could not be seen, but it
doubtless led round the hidden roots of the great central trees.
The Squire was already within a yard or two of this dark entry
when his daughter rose from the table and took a step or two
after him as if to call him back.
Treherne had also risen, and stood as if dazed at the effect of his
idle defiance. When Barbara moved he seemed to recover himself,
and stepping after her, said something which Paynter did not hear.
He said it casually and even distantly enough, but it clearly suggested
something to her mind; for, after a moment's thought, she nodded and
walked back, not toward the table, but apparently toward the house.
Paynter looked after her with a momentary curiosity, and when he turned
again the Squire had vanished into the hole in the wood.
"He's gone," said Treherne, with a clang of finality in his tones,
like the slamming of a door.
"Well, suppose he has?" cried the lawyer, roused at the voice.
"The Squire can go into his own wood, I suppose!
What the devil's all the fuss about, Mr. Paynter? Don't tell
me you think there's any harm in that plantation of sticks."
"No, I don't," said Paynter, throwing one leg over another and lighting
a cigar. "But I shall stop here till he comes out."
"Very well," said Ashe shortly, "I'll stop with you, if only to see
the end of this farce."
The doctor said nothing, but he also kept his seat and accepted
one of the American's cigars. If Treherne had been attending
to the matter he might have noted, with his sardonic superstition,
a curious fact--that, while all three men were tacitly condemning
themselves to stay out all night if necessary, all, by one blank
omission or oblivion, assumed that it was impossible to follow
their host into the wood just in front of them. But Treherne,
though still in the garden, had wandered away from the garden table,
and was pacing along the single line of trees against the dark sea.
They had in their regular interstices, showing the sea as through a series
of windows, something of the look of the ghost or skeleton of a cloister,
and he, having thrown his coat once more over his neck, like a cape,
passed to and fro like the ghost of some not very sane monk.
All these men, whether skeptics or mystics, looked back for
the rest of their lives on that night as on something unnatural.
They sat still or started up abruptly, and paced the great garden
in long detours, so that it seemed that no three of them were
together at a time, and none knew who would be his companion;
yet their rambling remained within the same dim and mazy space.
They fell into snatches of uneasy slumber; these were very brief,
and yet they felt as if the whole sitting, strolling, or occasional
speaking had been parts of a single dream.
Paynter woke once, and found Ashe sitting opposite him at a table
otherwise empty; his face dark in shadow and his cigar-end
like the red eye of a Cyclops. Until the lawyer spoke,
in his steady voice, Paynter was positively afraid of him.
He answered at random and nodded again; when he again woke
the lawyer was gone, and what was opposite him was the bald,
pale brow of the doctor; there seemed suddenly something
ominous in the familiar fact that he wore spectacles.
And yet the vanishing Ashe had only vanished a few yards away,
for he turned at that instant and strolled back to the table.
With a jerk Paynter realized that his nightmare was but a trick
of sleep or sleeplessness, and spoke in his natural voice,
but rather loud.
"So you've joined us again; where's Treherne?"
"Oh, still revolving, I suppose, like a polar bear under those trees
on the cliff," replied Ashe, motioning with his cigar, "looking at
what an older (and you will forgive me for thinking a somewhat better)
poet called the wine-dark sea. It really has a sort of purple shade;
look at it."
Paynter looked; he saw the wine-dark sea and the fantastic trees
that fringed it, but he did not see the poet; the cloister was
already empty of its restless monk.
"Gone somewhere else," he said, with futility far from characteristic.
"He'll be back here presently. This is an interesting vigil,
but a vigil loses some of its intensity when you can't
keep awake. Ah! Here's Treherne; so we're all mustered,
as the politician said when Mr. Colman came late for dinner.
No, the doctor's off again. how restless we all are!"
The poet had drawn near, his feet were falling soft on the grass,
and was gazing at them with a singular attentiveness.
"It will soon be over," he said.
"What?" snapped Ashe very abruptly.
"The night, of course," replied Treherne in a motionless manner.
"The darkest hour has passed."
"Didn't some other minor poet remark," inquired Paynter flippantly,
"that the darkest hour before the dawn--? My God, what was that?
It was like a scream."
"It was a scream," replied the poet. "The scream of a peacock."
Ashe stood up, his strong pale face against his red hair,
and said furiously: "What the devil do you mean?"
"Oh, perfectly natural causes, as Dr. Brown would say,"
replied Treherne. "Didn't the Squire tell us the trees
had a shrill note of their own when the wind blew?
The wind's beating up again from the sea; I shouldn't wonder
if there was a storm before dawn."
Dawn indeed came gradually with a growing noise of wind,
and the purple sea began to boil about the dark volcanic cliffs.
The first change in the sky showed itself only in the shapes
of the wood and the single stems growing darker but clearer;
and above the gray clump, against a glimpse of growing light,
they saw aloft the evil trinity of the trees. In their long lines
there seemed to Paynter something faintly serpentine and even spiral.
He could almost fancy he saw them slowly revolving as in
some cyclic dance, but this, again, was but a last delusion
of dreamland, for a few seconds later he was again asleep.
In dreams he toiled through a tangle of inconclusive tales,
each filled with the same stress and noise of sea and sea wind;
and above and outside all other voices the wailing of the
Trees of Pride.
When he woke it was broad day, and a bloom of early light lay
on wood and garden and on fields and farms for miles away.
The comparative common sense that daylight brings even to the sleepless
drew him alertly to his feet, and showed him all his companions
standing about the lawn in similar attitudes of expectancy.
There was no need to ask what they were expecting. They were waiting
to hear the nocturnal experiences, comic or commonplace or whatever
they might prove to be, of that eccentric friend, whose experiment
(whether from some subconscious fear or some fancy of honor)
they had not ventured to interrupt. Hour followed hour,
and still nothing stirred in the wood save an occasional bird.
The Squire, like most men of his type, was an early riser,
and it was not likely that he would in this case sleep late;
it was much more likely, in the excitement in which he had
left them, that he would not sleep at all. Yet it was clear
that he must be sleeping, perhaps by some reaction from a strain.
By the time the sun was high in heaven Ashe the lawyer,
turning to the others, spoke abruptly and to the point.
"Shall we go into the wood now?" asked Paynter, and almost
seemed to hesitate.
"I will go in," said Treherne simply. Then, drawing up his dark head
in answer to their glances, he added:
"No, do not trouble yourselves. It is never the believer
who is afraid."
For the second time they saw a man mount the white curling path
and disappear into the gray tangled wood, but this time they did
not have to wait long to see him again.
A few minutes later he reappeared in the woodland gateway,
and came slowly toward them across the grass. He stopped
before the doctor, who stood nearest, and said something.
It was repeated to the others, and went round the ring with
low cries of incredulity. The others plunged into the wood
and returned wildly, and were seen speaking to others again
who gathered from the house; the wild wireless telegraphy
which is the education of countryside communities spread it
farther and farther before the fact itself was fully realized;
and before nightfall a quarter of the county knew that Squire Vane
had vanished like a burst bubble.
Widely as the wild story was repeated, and patiently as it was pondered,
it was long before there was even the beginning of a sequel to it.
In the interval Paynter had politely removed himself from the house
of mourning, or rather of questioning, but only so far as the village inn;
for Barbara Vane was glad of the traveler's experience and sympathy,
in addition to that afforded her by the lawyer and doctor as old
friends of the family. Even Treherne was not discouraged from his
occasional visits with a view to helping the hunt for the lost man.
The five held many counsels round the old garden table, at which
the unhappy master of the house had dined for the last time;
and Barbara wore her old mask of stone, if it was now a more tragic mask.
She had shown no passion after the first morning of discovery,
when she had broken forth once, speaking strangely enough in the view
of some of her hearers.
She had come slowly out of the house, to which her own or some one
else's wisdom had relegated her during the night of the wager;
and it was clear from her face that somebody had told her
the truth; Miles, the butler, stood on the steps behind her;
and it was probably he.
"Do not be much distressed, Miss Vane," said Doctor Brown, in a low
and rather uncertain voice. "The search in the wood has hardly begun.
I am convinced we shall find--something quite simple."
"The doctor is right," said Ashe, in his firm tones; "I myself--"
"The doctor is not right," said the girl, turning a white
face on the speaker, "I know better. The poet is right.
The poet is always right. Oh, he has been here from the beginning
of the world, and seen wonders and terrors that are all
round our path, and only hiding behind a bush or a stone.
You and your doctoring and your science--why, you have only been
here for a few fumbling generations; and you can't conquer even
your own enemies of the flesh. Oh, forgive me, Doctor, I know you
do splendidly; but the fever comes in the village, and the people
die and die for all that. And now it's my poor father.
God help us all I The only thing left is to believe in God;
for we can't help believing in devils." And she left them,
still walking quite slowly, but in such a fashion that no one
could go after her.
The spring had already begun to ripen into summer, and spread a green
tent from the tree over the garden table, when the American visitor,
sitting there with his two professional companions, broke the silence
by saying what had long been in his mind.
"Well," he said, "I suppose whatever we may think it wise
to say, we have all begun to think of a possible conclusion.
It can't be put very delicately anyhow; but, after all,
there's a very necessary business side to it. What are we
going to do about poor Vane's affairs, apart from himself?
I suppose you know," he added, in a low voice to the lawyer,
"whether he made a will?"
"He left everything to his daughter unconditionally,"
replied Ashe. "But nothing can be done with it. There's no proof
whatever that he's dead." "No legal proof?" remarked Paynter dryly.
A wrinkle of irritation had appeared in the big bald brow of Doctor Brown;
and he made an impatient movement.
"Of course he's dead," he said. "What's the sense of all this
legal fuss? We were watching this side of the wood, weren't we?
A man couldn't have flown off those high cliffs over the sea;
he could only have fallen off. What else can he be but dead?"
"I speak as a lawyer," returned Ashe, raising his eyebrows.
"We can't presume his death, or have an inquest or anything
till we find the poor fellow's body, or some remains that may
reasonably be presumed to be his body."
"I see," observed Paynter quietly. "You speak as a lawyer;
but I don't think it's very hard to guess what you think
as a man."
"I own I'd rather be a man than a lawyer," said the doctor,
rather roughly. "I'd no notion the law was such an ass.
What's the good of keeping the poor girl out of her property,
and the estate all going to pieces? Well, I must be off,
or my patients will be going to pieces too."
And with a curt salutation he pursued his path down to the village.
"That man does his duty, if anybody does," remarked Paynter. "We must
pardon his--shall I say manners or manner?"
"Oh, I bear him no malice," replied Ashe good-humoredly, "But I'm
glad he's gone, because--well, because I don't want him to know
how jolly right he is." And he leaned back in his chair and stared
up at the roof of green leaves.
"You are sure," said Paynter, looking at the table,
"that Squire Vane is dead?"
"More than that," said Ashe, still staring at the leaves.
"I'm sure of how he died."
"Ah!" said the American, with an intake of breath, and they remained
for a moment, one gazing at the tree and the other at the table.
"Sure is perhaps too strong a word," continued Ashe. "But my conviction
will want some shaking. I don't envy the counsel for the defense."
"The counsel for the defense," repeated Paynter, and looked up
quickly at his companion. He was struck again by the man's
Napoleon'ic chin and jaw, as he had been when they first talked
of the legend of St. Securis.
"Then," he began, "you don't think the trees--"
"The trees be damned!" snorted the lawyer. "The tree had two legs
on that evening. What our friend the poet," he added, with a sneer,
"would call a walking tree. Apropos of our friend the poet,
you seemed surprised that night to find he was not walking poetically
by the sea all the time, and I fear I affected to share your ignorance.
I was not so sure then as I am now."
"Sure of what?" demanded the other.
"To begin with," said Ashe, "I'm sure our friend the poet followed
Vane into the wood that night, for I saw him coming out again."
Paynter leaned forward, suddenly pale with excitement, and struck
the wooden table so that it rattled.
"Mr. Ashe, you're wrong," he cried. "You're a wonderful
man and you're wrong. You've probably got tons of true
convincing evidence, and you're wrong. I know this poet;
I know him as a poet; and that's just what you don't. I know you
think he gave you crooked answers, and seemed to be all smiles
and black looks at once; but you don't understand the type.
I know now why you don't understand the Irish. Sometimes you
think it's soft, and sometimes sly, and sometimes murderous,
and sometimes uncivilized; and all the time it's only civilized;
quivering with the sensitive irony of understanding all that
you don't understand."
"Well," said Ashe shortly, "we'll see who's right."
"We will," cried Cyprian, and rose suddenly from the table.
All the drooping of the aesthete had dropped from him;
his Yankee accent rose high, like a horn of defiance, and there
was nothing about him but the New World.
"I guess I will look into this myself," he said, stretching his long
limbs like an athlete. "I search that little wood of yours to-morrow.
It's a bit late, or I'd do it now."
"The wood has been searched," said the lawyer, rising also.
"Yes," drawled the American. "It's been searched by servants,
policemen, local policeman, and quite a lot of people;
and do you know I have a notion that nobody round here is likely
to have searched it at all."
"And what are you going to do with it?" asked Ashe.
"What I bet they haven't done," replied Cyprian. "I'm going
to climb a tree."
And with a quaint air of renewed cheerfulness he took himself
away at a rapid walk to his inn.
He appeared at daybreak next morning outside the Vane Arms with
all the air of one setting out on his travels in distant lands.
He had a field glass slung over his shoulder, and a very large
sheath knife buckled by a belt round his waist, and carried
with the cool bravado of the bowie knife of a cowboy.
But in spite of this backwoodsman's simplicity, or perhaps rather
because of it, he eyed with rising relish the picturesque plan
and sky line of the antiquated village, and especially the wooden
square of the old inn sign that hung over his head; a shield,
of which the charges seemed to him a mere medley of blue dolphins,
gold crosses, and scarlet birds. The colors and cubic corners
of that painted board pleased him like a play or a puppet show.
He stood staring and straddling for some moments on the cobbles
of the little market place; then he gave a short laugh and began
to mount the steep streets toward the high park and garden beyond.
From the high lawn, above the tree and table, he could see on one side
the land stretch away past the house into a great rolling plain,
which under the clear edges of the dawn seemed dotted with
picturesque details. The woods here and there on the plain looked
like green hedgehogs, as grotesque as the incongruous beasts found
unaccountably walking in the blank spaces of mediaeval maps.
The land, cut up into colored fields, recalled the heraldry
of the signboard; this also was at once ancient and gay.
On the other side the ground to seaward swept down and then up
again to the famous or infamous wood; the square of strange
trees lay silently tilted on the slope, also suggesting,
if not a map, or least a bird's-eye view. Only the triple
centerpiece of the peacock trees rose clear of the sky line;
and these stood up in tranquil sunlight as things almost classical,
a triangular temple of the winds. They seemed pagan in a newer
and more placid sense; and he felt a newer and more boyish
curiosity and courage for the consulting of the oracle.
In all his wanderings he had never walked so lightly, for the
connoisseur of sensations had found something to do at last;
he was fighting for a friend.
He was brought to a standstill once, however, and that at
the very gateway of the garden of the trees of knowledge.
just outside the black entry of the wood, now curtained with
greener and larger leafage, he came on a solitary figure.
It was Martin, the woodcutter, wading in the bracken and looking about
him in rather a lost fashion. The man seemed to be talking to himself.
"I dropped it here," he was saying. "But I'll never work with it again
I reckon. Doctor wouldn't let me pick it up, when I wanted to pick it up;
and now they've got it, like they've got the Squire. Wood and iron,
wood and iron, but eating it's nothing to them."
"Come!" said Paynter kindly, remembering the man's domestic trouble.
"Miss Vane will see you have anything you want, I know. And look here,
don't brood on all those stories about the Squire. Is there
the slightest trace of the trees having anything to do with it?
Is there even this extra branch the idiots talked about?"
There had been growing on Paynter the suspicion that the man before him
was not perfectly sane; yet he was much more startled by the sudden
and cold sanity that looked for. an instant out of the woodman's eyes,
as he answered in his ordinary manner.
"Well, sir, did you count the branches before?"
Then he seemed to relapse; and Paynter left him wandering and wavering
in the undergrowth; and entered the wood like one across whose sunny
path a shadow has fallen for an instant.
Diving under the wood, he was soon threading a leafy path which,
even under that summer sun, shone only with an emerald twilight,
as if it were on the floor of the sea. It wound about more shakily
than he had supposed, as if resolved to approach the central trees
as if they were the heart of the maze at Hampton Court. They were
the heart of the maze for him, anyhow; he sought them as straight as a
crooked road would carry him; and, turning a final corner, he beheld,
for the first time, the foundations of those towers of vegetation he had
as yet only seen from above, as they stood waist-high in the woodland.
He found the suspicion correct which supposed the tree branched from one
great root, like a candelabrum; the fork, though stained and slimy with
green fungoids, was quite near the ground, and offered a first foothold.
He put his foot in it, and without a flash of hesitation went aloft,
like Jack climbing the Bean stalk.
Above him the green roof of leaves and boughs seemed sealed like
a firmament of foliage; but, by bending and breaking the branches
to right and left he slowly forced a passage upward; and had at last,
and suddenly, the sensation coming out on the top of the world.
He felt as if he had never been in the open air before.
Sea and land lay in a circle below and about him, as he sat
astride a branch of the tall tree; he was almost surprised to see
the sun still comparatively low in the sky; as if he were looking
over a land of eternal sunrise.
"Silent upon a peak in Darien," he remarked, in a needlessly
loud and cheerful voice; and though the claim, thus expressed,
was illogical, it was not inappropriate. He did feel as if
he were a primitive adventurer just come to the New World,
instead of a modern traveler just come from it.
"I wonder," he proceeded, "whether I am really the first that ever
burst into this silent tree. It looks like it. Those--"
He stopped and sat on his branch quite motionless, but his eyes
were turned on a branch a little below it, and they were brilliant
with a vigilance, like those of a man watching a snake.
What he was looking at might, at first sight, have been a large
white fungus spreading on the smooth and monstrous trunk;
but it was not.
Leaning down dangerously from his perch, he detached it from
the twig on which it had caught, and then sat holding it in his
hand and gazing at it. It was Squire Vane's white Panama hat,
but there was no Squire Vane under it. Paynter felt a nameless
relief in the very fact that there was not.
There in the clear sunlight and sea air, for an instant, all the
tropical terrors of his own idle tale surrounded and suffocated him.
It seemed indeed some demon tree of the swamps; a vegetable serpent
that fed on men. Even the hideous farce in the fancy of digesting a whole
man with the exception of his hat, seemed only to simplify the nightmare.
And he found himself gazing dully at one leaf of the tree, which happened
to be turned toward him, so that the odd markings, which had partly made
the legend, really looked a little like the eye in a peacock's feather.
It was as if the sleeping tree had opened one eye upon him.
With a sharp effort he steadied himself in mind and posture on the bough;
his reason returned, and he began to descend with the hat in his teeth.
When he was back in the underworld of the wood, he studied the hat again
and with closer attention. In one place in the crown there was a hole
or rent, which certainly had not been there when it had last lain
on the table under the garden tree. He sat down, lit a cigarette,
and reflected for a long time.
A wood, even a small wood, is not an easy thing to search minutely;
but he provided himself with some practical tests in the matter.
In one sense the very density of the thicket was a help;
he could at least see where anyone had strayed from the path,
by broken and trampled growths of every kind. After many hours'
industry, he had made a sort of new map of the place;
and had decided beyond doubt that some person or persons had
so strayed, for some purpose, in several defined directions.
There was a way burst through the bushes, making a short cut
across a loop of the wandering path; there was another forking
out from it as an alternative way into the central space.
But there was one especially which was unique, and which seemed
to him, the more he studied it, to point to some essential
of the mystery.
One of these beaten and broken tracks went from the space under
the peacock trees outward into the wood for about twenty yards
and then stopped. Beyond that point not a twig was broken nor
a leaf disturbed. It had no exit, but he could not believe
that it had no goal. After some further reflection, he knelt
down and began to cut away grass and clay with his knife,
and was surprised at the ease with which they detached themselves.
In a few moments a whole section of the soil lifted like a lid;
it was a round lid and presented a quaint appearance, like a flat cap
with green feathers. For though the disc itself was made of wood,
there was a layer of earth on it with the live grass still growing there.
And the removal of the round lid revealed a round hole, black as
night and seemingly bottomless. Paynter understood it instantly.
It was rather near the sea for a well to be sunk, but the traveler
had known wells sunk even nearer. He rose to his feet with the great
knife in his hand, a frown on his face, and his doubts resolved.
He no longer shrank from naming what he knew. This was not the first
corpse that had been thrown down a well; here, without stone or epitaph,
was the grave of Squire Vane. In a flash all the mythological follies
about saints and peacocks were forgotten; he was knocked on the head,
as with a stone club, by the human common sense of crime.
Cyprian Paynter stood long by the well in the wood,
walked round it in meditation, examined its rim and the ring
of grass about it, searched the surrounding soil thoroughly,
came back and stood beside the well once more. His researches
and reflections had been so long that he had not realized that
the day had passed and that the wood and the world round it were
beginning already to be steeped in the enrichment of evening.
The day had been radiantly calm; the sea seemed to be as
still as the well, and the well was as still as a mirror.
And then, quite without warning, the mirror moved of itself
like a living thing.
In the well, in the wood, the water leapt and gurgled, with a
grotesque noise like something swallowing, and then settled again
with a second sound. Cyprian could not see into the well clearly,
for the opening, from where he stood, was an ellipse, a mere slit,
and half masked by thistles and rank grass like a green beard.
For where he stood now was three yards away from the well,
and he had not yet himself realized that he had sprung back all
that distance from the brink when the water spoke.
Content of CHAPTER II - THE WAGER OF SQUIRE VANE [G K Chesterton's novel: The Trees of Pride]
_
Read next: CHAPTER III - THE MYSTERY OF THE WELL
Read previous: CHAPTER I - THE TALE OF THE PEACOCK TREES
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