Sylvia Seltoun ate her breakfast in the morning-room at
Yessney with a pleasant sense of ultimate victory, such as a
fervent Ironside might have permitted himself on the morrow
of Worcester fight. She was scarcely pugnacious by
temperament, but belonged to that more successful class of
fighters who are pugnacious by circumstance. Fate had
willed that her life should be occupied with a series of
small struggles, usually with the odds slightly against her,
and usually she had just managed to come through winning.
And now she felt that she had brought her hardest and
certainly her most important struggle to a successful issue.
To have married Mortimer Seltoun, “Dead Mortimer” as his
more intimate enemies called him, in the teeth of the cold
hostility of his family, and in spite of his unaffected
indifference to women, was indeed an achievement that had
needed some determination and adroitness to carry through;
yesterday she had brought her victory to its concluding
stage by wrenching her husband away from Town and its group
of satellite watering-places and “settling him down,” in
the vocabulary of her kind, in this remote wood-girt manor
farm which was his country house.
“You will never get Mortimer to go,” his mother had said
carpingly, “but if he once goes he'll stay; Yessney throws
almost as much a spell over him as Town does. One can
understand what holds him to Town, but Yessney---” and the
dowager had shrugged her shoulders.
There was a sombre almost savage wildness about Yessney
that was certainly not likely to appeal to town-bred tastes,
and Sylvia, notwithstanding her name, was accustomed to
nothing much more sylvan than “leafy Kensington.” She
looked on the country as something excellent and wholesome
in its way, which was apt to become troublesome if you
encouraged it overmuch. Distrust of townlife had been a new
thing with her, born of her marriage with Mortimer, and she
had watched with satisfaction the gradual fading of what she
called “the Jermyn-Street-look” in his eyes as the woods
and heather of Yessney had closed in on them yesternight.
Her will-power and strategy had prevailed; Mortimer would
stay. Outside the morning-room windows was a triangular
slope of turf, which the indulgent might call a lawn, and
beyond its low hedge of neglected fuschia bushes a steeper
slope of heather and bracken dropped down into cavernous
combes overgrown with oak and yew. In its wild open
savagery there seemed a stealthy linking of the joy of life
with the terror of unseen things. Sylvia smiled
complacently as she gazed with a School-of-Art appreciation
at the landscape, and then of a sudden she almost shuddered.
“It is very wild,” she said to Mortimer, who had joined
her; “one could almost think that in such a place the
worship of Pan had never quite died out.”
“The worship of Pan never has died out,” said Mortimer.
“Other newer gods have drawn aside his votaries from time
to time, but he is the Nature-God to whom all must come back
at last. He has been called the Father of all the Gods, but
most of his children have been stillborn.”
Sylvia was religious in an honest, vaguely devotional kind
of way, and did not like to hear her beliefs spoken of as
mere aftergrowths, but it was at least something new and
hopeful to hear Dead Mortimer speak with such energy and
conviction on any subject.
“You don't really believe in Pan?” she asked
incredulously.
“I've been a fool in most things,” said Mortimer
quietly, “but I'm not such a fool as not to believe in Pan
when I'm down here. And if you're wise you won't disbelieve
in him too boastfully while you're in his country.”
It was not till a week later, when Sylvia had exhausted
the attractions of the woodland walks round Yessney, that
she ventured on a tour of inspection of the farm buildings.
A farmyard suggested in her mind a scene of cheerful bustle,
with churns and flails and smiling dairymaids, and teams of
horses drinking knee-deep in duck-crowded ponds. As she
wandered among the gaunt grey buildings of Yessney manor
farm her first impression was one of crushing stillness and
desolation, as though she had happened on some lone deserted
homestead long given over to owls and cobwebs; then came a
sense of furtive watchful hostility, the same shadow of
unseen things that seemed to lurk in the wooded combes and
coppices. From behind heavy doors and shuttered windows came
the restless stamp of hoof or rasp of chain halter, and at
times a muffled bellow from some stalled beast. From a
distant comer a shaggy dog watched her with intent
unfriendly eyes; as she drew near it slipped quietly into
its kennel, and slipped out again as noiselessly when she
had passed by. A few hens, questing for food under a rick,
stole away under a gate at her approach. Sylvia felt that
if she had come across any human beings in this wilderness
of barn and byre they would have fled wraith-like from her
gaze. At last, turning a corner quickly, she came upon a
living thing that did not fly from her. Astretch in a pool
of mud was an enormous sow, gigantic beyond the town-woman's
wildest computation of swine-flesh, and speedily alert to
resent and if necessary repel the unwonted intrusion. It
was Sylvia's turn to make an unobtrusive retreat. As she
threaded her way past rickyards and cowsheds and long blank
walls, she started suddenly at a strange sound---the echo of
a boy's laughter, golden and equivocal. Jan, the only boy
employed on the farm, a tow-headed, wizen-faced yokel, was
visibly at work on a potato clearing half-way up the nearest
hill-side, and Mortimer, when questioned, knew of no other
probable or possible begetter of the hidden mockery that had
ambushed Sylvia's retreat. The memory of that untraceable
echo was added to her other impressions of a furtive
sinister “something” that hung around Yessney.
Of Mortimer she saw very little; farm and woods and trout-
streams seemed to swallow him up from dawn till dusk. Once,
following the direction she had seen him take in the
morning, she came to an open space in a nut copse, further
shut in by huge yew trees, in the centre of which stood a
stone pedestal surmounted by a small bronze figure of a
youthful Pan. It was a beautiful piece of workmanship, but
her attention was chiefly held by the fact that a newly cut
bunch of grapes had been placed as an offering at its feet.
Grapes were none too plentiful at the manor house, and
Sylvia snatched the bunch angrily from the pedestal.
Contemptuous annoyance dominated her thoughts as she
strolled slowly homeward, and then gave way to a sharp
feeling of something that was very near fright; across a
thick tangle of undergrowth a boy's face was scowling at
her, brown and beautiful, with unutterably evil eyes. It
was a lonely pathway, all pathways round Yessney were lonely
for the matter of that, and she sped forward without waiting
to give a closer scrutiny to this sudden apparition. It was
not till she had reached the house that she discovered that
she had dropped the bunch of grapes in her flight.
“I saw a youth in the wood today,” she told Mortimer
that evening, “brown-faced and rather handsome, but a
scoundrel to look at. A gipsy lad, I suppose.”
“A reasonable theory,” said Mortimer, “only there
aren't any gipsies in these parts at present.”
“Then who was he?” asked Sylvia, and as Mortimer appeared
to have no theory of his own she passed on to recount her
finding of the votive offering.
“I suppose it was your doing,” she observed; “it's a
harmless piece of lunacy, but people would think you
dreadfully silly if they knew of it.”
“Did you meddle with it in any way?” asked Mortimer.
“I---I threw the grapes away. It seemed so silly,” said
Sylvia, watching Mortimer's impassive face for a sign of
annoyance.
“I don't think you were wise to do that,” he said
reflectively. “I've heard it said that the Wood Gods are
rather horrible to those who molest them.”
“Horrible perhaps to those that believe in them, but you
see I don't,” retorted Sylvia.
“All the same,” said Mortimer in his even, dispassionate
tone, “I should avoid the woods and orchards if I were you,
and give a wide berth to the horned beasts on the farm.”
It was all nonsense, of course, but in that lonely
wood-girt spot nonsense seemed able to rear a bastard brood
of uneasiness.
“Mortimer,” said Sylvia suddenly, “I think we will go
back to Town some time soon.”
Her victory had not been so complete as she had supposed;
it had carried her on to ground that she was already anxious
to quit.
“I don't think you will ever go back to Town,” said
Mortimer. He seemed to be paraphrasing his mother's
prediction as to himself.
Sylvia noted with dissatisfaction and some self-contempt
that the course of her next afternoon's ramble took her
instinctively clear of the network of woods. As to the
horned cattle, Mortimer's warning was scarcely needed, for
she had always regarded them as of doubtful neutrality at
the best: her imagination unsexed the most matronly dairy
cows and turned them into bulls liable to “see red” at any
moment. The ram who fed in the narrow paddock below the
orchards she had adjudged, after ample and cautious
probation, to be of docile temper; today, however, she
decided to leave his docility untested, for the usually
tranquil beast was roaming with every sign of restlessness
from corner to corner of his meadow. A low, fitful piping,
as of some reedy flute, was coming from the depth of a
neighbouring copse, and there seemed to be some subtle
connection between the animal's restless pacing and the wild
music from the wood. Sylvia turned her steps in an upward
direction and climbed the heather-clad slopes that stretched
in rolling shoulders high above Yessney. She had left the
piping notes behind her, but across the wooded combes at her
feet the wind brought her another kind of music, the
straining bay of hounds in full chase. Yessney was just on
the outskirts of the Devon-and-Somerset country, and the
hunted deer sometimes came that way. Sylvia could presently
see a dark body, breasting hill after hill, and sinking
again and again out of sight as he crossed the combes, while
behind him steadily swelled that relentless chorus, and she
grew tense with the excited sympathy that one feels for any
hunted thing in whose capture one is not directly
interested. And at last he broke through the outermost line
of oak scrub and fern and stood panting in the open, a fat
September stag carrying a well-furnished head. His obvious
course was to drop down to the brown pools of Undercombe,
and thence make his way towards the red deer's favoured
sanctuary, the sea. To Sylvia's surprise, however, he
turned his head to the upland slope and came lumbering
resolutely onward over the heather. “It will be
dreadful,” she thought, “the hounds will pull him down
under my very eyes.” But the music of the pack seemed to
have died away for a moment, and in its place she heard
again that wild piping, which rose now on this side, now on
that, as though urging the failing stag to a final effort.
Sylvia stood well aside from his path, half hidden in a
thick growth of whortle bushes, and watched him swing
stiffly upward, his flanks dark with sweat, the coarse hair
on his neck showing light by contrast. The pipe music
shrilled suddenly around her, seeming to come from the
bushes at her very feet, and at the same moment the great
beast slewed round and bore directly down upon her. In an
instant her pity for the hunted animal was changed to wild
terror at her own danger; the thick heather roots mocked her
scrambling efforts at flight, and she looked frantically
downward for a glimpse of oncoming hounds. The huge antler
spikes were within a few yards of her, and in a flash of
numbing fear she remembered Mortimer's warning, to beware of
horned beasts on the farm. And then with a quick throb of
joy she saw that she was not alone; a human figure stood a
few paces aside, knee-deep in the whortle bushes.
“Drive it off!” she shrieked. But the figure made no
answering movement.
The antlers drove straight at her breast, the acrid smell
of the hunted animal was in her nostrils, but her eyes were
filled with the horror of something she saw other than her
oncoming death. And in her ears rang the echo of a boy's
laughter, golden and equivocal.