I

by Arthur Machen

　　There was a glow in the sky as if great furnace doors were opened.

　　But all the afternoon his eyes had looked on glamour; he had strayed infairyland. The holidays were nearly done, and Lucian Taylor had gone outresolved to lose himself, to discover strange hills and prospects that hehad never seen before. The air was still, breathless, exhausted afterheavy rain, and the clouds looked as if they had been molded of lead. Nobreeze blew upon the hill, and down in the well of the valley not a dryleaf stirred, not a bough shook in all the dark January woods.

　　About a mile from the rectory he had diverged from the main road by anopening that promised mystery and adventure. It was an old neglectedlane, little more than a ditch, worn ten feet deep by its winter waters,and shadowed by great untrimmed hedges, densely woven together. On eachside were turbid streams, and here and there a torrent of water gusheddown the banks, flooding the lane. It was so deep and dark that he couldnot get a glimpse of the country through which he was passing, but theway went down and down to some unconjectured hollow.

　　Perhaps he walked two miles between the high walls of the lane before itsdescent ceased, but he thrilled with the sense of having journeyed veryfar, all the long way from the know to the unknown. He had come as itwere into the bottom of a bowl amongst the hills, and black woods shutout the world. From the road behind him, from the road before him, fromthe unseen wells beneath the trees, rivulets of waters swelled andstreamed down towards the center to the brook that crossed the lane. Amidthe dead and wearied silence of the air, beneath leaden and motionlessclouds, it was strange to hear such a tumult of gurgling and rushingwater, and he stood for a while on the quivering footbridge and watchedthe rush of dead wood and torn branches and wisps of straw, all hurryingmadly past him, to plunge into the heaped spume, the barmy froth that hadgathered against a fallen tree.

　　Then he climbed again, and went up between limestone rocks, higher andhigher, till the noise of waters became indistinct, a faint humming ofswarming hives in summer. He walked some distance on level ground, tillthere was a break in the banks and a stile on which he could lean andlook out. He found himself, as he had hoped, afar and forlorn; he hadstrayed into outland and occult territory. From the eminence of thelane, skirting the brow of a hill, he looked down into deep valleys anddingles, and beyond, across the trees, to remoter country, wild barehills and dark wooded lands meeting the grey still sky. Immediatelybeneath his feet the ground sloped steep down to the valley, a hillsideof close grass patched with dead bracken, and dotted here and there withstunted thorns, and below there were deep oak woods, all still andsilent, and lonely as if no one ever passed that way. The grass andbracken and thorns and woods, all were brown and grey beneath the leadensky, and as Lucian looked he was amazed, as though he were reading awonderful story, the meaning of which was a little greater than hisunderstanding. Then, like the hero of a fairy-book, he went on and on,catching now and again glimpses of the amazing country into which he hadpenetrated, and perceiving rather than seeing that as the day wanedeverything grew more grey and somber. As he advanced he heard the eveningsounds of the farms, the low of the cattle, and the barking of thesheepdogs; a faint thin noise from far away. It was growing late, and asthe shadows blackened he walked faster, till once more the lane began todescend, there was a sharp turn, and he found himself, with a good dealof relief, and a little disappointment, on familiar ground. He had nearlydescribed a circle, and knew this end of the lane very well; it was notmuch more than a mile from home. He walked smartly down the hill; the airwas all glimmering and indistinct, transmuting trees and hedges intoghostly shapes, and the walls of the White House Farm flickered on thehillside, as if they were moving towards him. Then a change came. First,a little breath of wind brushed with a dry whispering sound through thehedges, the few leaves left on the boughs began to stir, and one or twodanced madly, and as the wind freshened and came up from a new quarter,the sapless branches above rattled against one another like bones. Thegrowing breeze seemed to clear the air and lighten it. He was passing thestile where a path led to old Mrs. Gibbon's desolate little cottage, inthe middle of the fields, at some distance even from the lane, and he sawthe light blue smoke of her chimney rise distinct above the gauntgreengage trees, against a pale band that was broadening along thehorizon. As he passed the stile with his head bent, and his eyes on theground, something white started out from the black shadow of the hedge,and in the strange twilight, now tinged with a flush from the west, afigure seemed to swim past him and disappear. For a moment he wonderedwho it could be, the light was so flickering and unsteady, so unlike thereal atmosphere of the day, when he recollected it was only Annie Morgan,old Morgan's daughter at the White House. She was three years older thanhe, and it annoyed him to find that though she was only fifteen, therehad been a dreadful increase in her height since the summer holidays. Hehad got to the bottom of the hill, and, lifting up his eyes, saw thestrange changes of the sky. The pale band had broadened into a clear vastspace of light, and above, the heavy leaden clouds were breaking apartand driving across the heaven before the wind. He stopped to watch,and looked up at the great mound that jutted out from the hills intomid-valley. It was a natural formation, and always it must have hadsomething of the form of a fort, but its steepness had been increased byRoman art, and there were high banks on the summit which Lucian's fatherhad told him were the vallum of the camp, and a deep ditch had been dugto the north to sever it from the hillside. On this summit oaks hadgrown, queer stunted-looking trees with twisted and contorted trunks, andwrithing branches; and these now stood out black against the lighted sky.And then the air changed once more; the flush increased, and a spot likeblood appeared in the pond by the gate, and all the clouds were touchedwith fiery spots and dapples of flame; here and there it looked as ifawful furnace doors were being opened.

　　The wind blew wildly, and it came up through the woods with a noise likea scream, and a great oak by the roadside ground its boughs together witha dismal grating jar. As the red gained in the sky, the earth and allupon it glowed, even the grey winter fields and the bare hillsidescrimsoned, the waterpools were cisterns of molten brass, and the veryroad glittered. He was wonder-struck, almost aghast, before the scarletmagic of the afterglow. The old Roman fort was invested with fire; flamesfrom heaven were smitten about its walls, and above there was a darkfloating cloud, like fume of smoke, and every haggard writhing treeshowed as black as midnight against the black of the furnace.

　　When he got home he heard his mother's voice calling: "Here's Lucian atlast. Mary, Master Lucian has come, you can get the tea ready." He told along tale of his adventures, and felt somewhat mortified when his fatherseemed perfectly acquainted with the whole course of the lane, and knewthe names of the wild woods through which he had passed in awe.

　　"You must have gone by the Darren, I suppose"—that was all he said."Yes, I noticed the sunset; we shall have some stormy weather. I don'texpect to see many in church tomorrow."

　　There was buttered toast for tea "because it was holidays." The redcurtains were drawn, and a bright fire was burning, and there was the oldfamiliar furniture, a little shabby, but charming from association. Itwas much pleasanter than the cold and squalid schoolroom; and much betterto be reading Chambers's Journal than learning Euclid; and better totalk to his father and mother than to be answering such remarks as: "Isay, Taylor, I've torn my trousers; how much do you charge formending?" "Lucy, dear, come quick and sew this button on my shirt."

　　That night the storm woke him, and he groped with his hands amongst thebedclothes, and sat up, shuddering, not knowing where he was. He had seenhimself, in a dream, within the Roman fort, working some dark horror, andthe furnace doors were opened and a blast of flame from heaven wassmitten upon him.

　　Lucian went slowly, but not discreditably, up the school, gaining prizesnow and again, and falling in love more and more with useless reading andunlikely knowledge. He did his elegiacs and iambics well enough, but hepreferred exercising himself in the rhymed Latin of the middle ages. Heliked history, but he loved to meditate on a land laid waste, Britaindeserted by the legions, the rare pavements riven by frost, Celtic magicstill brooding on the wild hills and in the black depths of the forest,the rosy marbles stained with rain, and the walls growing grey. Themasters did not encourage these researches; a pure enthusiasm, they felt,should be for cricket and football, the dilettanti might even playfives and read Shakespeare without blame, but healthy English boys shouldhave nothing to do with decadent periods. He was once found guilty ofrecommending Villon to a school-fellow named Barnes. Barnes tried toextract unpleasantness from the text during preparation, and rioted inhis place, owing to his incapacity for the language. The matter was aserious one; the headmaster had never heard of Villon, and the culpritgave up the name of his literary admirer without remorse. Hence, sorrowfor Lucian, and complete immunity for the miserable illiterate Barnes,who resolved to confine his researches to the Old Testament, a book whichthe headmaster knew well. As for Lucian, he plodded on, learning his workdecently, and sometimes doing very creditable Latin and Greek prose. Hisschool-fellows thought him quite mad, and tolerated him, and indeed werevery kind to him in their barbarous manner. He often remembered in afterlife acts of generosity and good nature done by wretches like Barnes, whohad no care for old French nor for curious meters, and such recollectionsalways moved him to emotion. Travelers tell such tales; cast upon cruelshores amongst savage races, they have found no little kindness andwarmth of hospitality.

　　He looked forward to the holidays as joyfully as the rest of them. Barnesand his friend Duscot used to tell him their plans and anticipation; theywere going home to brothers and sisters, and to cricket, more cricket, orto football, more football, and in the winter there were parties andjollities of all sorts. In return he would announce his intention ofstudying the Hebrew language, or perhaps Provençal, with a walk up a bareand desolate mountain by way of open-air amusement, and on a rainy dayfor choice. Whereupon Barnes would impart to Duscot his confident beliefthat old Taylor was quite cracked. It was a queer, funny life that ofschool, and so very unlike anything in Tom Brown. He once saw theheadmaster patting the head of the bishop's little boy, while he calledhim "my little man," and smiled hideously. He told the tale grotesquelyin the lower fifth room the same day, and earned much applause, butforfeited all liking directly by proposing a voluntary course ofscholastic logic. One barbarian threw him to the ground and anotherjumped on him, but it was done very pleasantly. There were, indeed, somefew of a worse class in the school, solemn sycophants, prigs perfectedfrom tender years, who thought life already "serious," and yet, as theheadmaster said, were "joyous, manly young fellows." Some of thesedressed for dinner at home, and talked of dances when they came back inJanuary. But this virulent sort was comparatively infrequent, andachieved great success in after life. Taking his school days as a whole,he always spoke up for the system, and years afterward he describedwith enthusiasm the strong beer at a roadside tavern, some way out of thetown. But he always maintained that the taste for tobacco, acquired inearly life, was the great life, was the great note of the English PublicSchool.

　　Three years after Lucian's discovery of the narrow lane and the vision ofthe flaming fort, the August holidays brought him home at a time of greatheat. It was one of those memorable years of English weather, when someProvençal spell seems wreathed round the island in the northern sea, andthe grasshoppers chirp loudly as the cicadas, the hills smell ofrosemary, and white walls of the old farmhouses blaze in the sunlightas if they stood in Arles or Avignon or famed Tarascon by Rhone.

　　Lucian's father was late at the station, and consequently Lucian boughtthe Confessions of an English Opium Eater which he saw on thebookstall. When his father did drive up, Lucian noticed that the old traphad had a new coat of dark paint, and that the pony looked advanced inyears.

　　"I was afraid that I should be late, Lucian," said his father, "though Imade old Polly go like anything. I was just going to tell George to puther into the trap when young Philip Harris came to me in a terriblestate. He said his father fell down 'all of a sudden like' in the middleof the field, and they couldn't make him speak, and would I please tocome and see him. So I had to go, though I couldn't do anything for thepoor fellow. They had sent for Dr. Burrows, and I am afraid he will findit a bad case of sunstroke. The old people say they never remember such aheat before."

　　The pony jogged steadily along the burning turnpike road, taking revengefor the hurrying on the way to the station. The hedges were white withthe limestone dust, and the vapor of heat palpitated over the fields.Lucian showed his Confessions to his father, and began to talk of thebeautiful bits he had already found. Mr. Taylor knew the book well—hadread it many years before. Indeed he was almost as difficult to surpriseas that character in Daudet, who had one formula for all the chances oflife, and when he saw the drowned Academician dragged out of the river,merely observed "J'ai vu tout ça." Mr. Taylor the parson, as hisparishioners called him, had read the fine books and loved the hillsand woods, and now knew no more of pleasant or sensational surprises.Indeed the living was much depreciated in value, and his own privatemeans were reduced almost to vanishing point, and under suchcircumstances the great style loses many of its finer savors. He was veryfond of Lucian, and cheered by his return, but in the evening he would bea sad man again, with his head resting on one hand, and eyes reproachingsorry fortune.

　　Nobody called out "Here's your master with Master Lucian; you can get teaready," when the pony jogged up to the front door. His mother had beendead a year, and a cousin kept house. She was a respectable person calledDeacon, of middle age, and ordinary standards; and, consequently, therewas cold mutton on the table. There was a cake, but nothing of flour,baked in ovens, would rise at Miss Deacon's evocation. Still, the mealwas laid in the beloved "parlor," with the view of hills and valleys andclimbing woods from the open window, and the old furniture was stillpleasant to see, and the old books in the shelves had many memories. Oneof the most respected of the armchairs had become weak in the castors andhad to be artfully propped up, but Lucian found it very comfortable afterthe hard forms. When tea was over he went out and strolled in the gardenand orchards, and looked over the stile down into the brake, wherefoxgloves and bracken and broom mingled with the hazel undergrowth, wherehe knew of secret glades and untracked recesses, deep in the woven green,the cabinets for many years of his lonely meditations. Every path abouthis home, every field and hedgerow had dear and friendly memories forhim; and the odor of the meadowsweet was better than the incense steamingin the sunshine. He loitered, and hung over the stile till the far-offwoods began to turn purple, till the white mists were wreathing in thevalley.

　　Day after day, through all that August, morning and evening were wrappedin haze; day after day the earth shimmered in the heat, and the air wasstrange, unfamiliar. As he wandered in the lanes and sauntered by thecool sweet verge of the woods, he saw and felt that nothing was common oraccustomed, for the sunlight transfigured the meadows and changed all theform of the earth. Under the violent Provençal sun, the elms and beecheslooked exotic trees, and in the early morning, when the mists were thick,the hills had put on an unearthly shape.

　　The one adventure of the holidays was the visit to the Roman fort, tothat fantastic hill about whose steep bastions and haggard oaks he hadseen the flames of sunset writhing nearly three years before. Ever sincethat Saturday evening in January, the lonely valley had been a desirableplace to him; he had watched the green battlements in summer and winterweather, had seen the heaped mounds rising dimly amidst the driftingrain, had marked the violent height swim up from the ice-white mists ofsummer evenings, had watched the fairy bulwarks glimmer and vanish inhovering April twilight. In the hedge of the lane there was a gate onwhich he used to lean and look down south to where the hill surged up sosuddenly, its summit defined on summer evenings not only by the roundedramparts but by the ring of dense green foliage that marked the circleof oak trees. Higher up the lane, on the way he had come that Saturdayafternoon, one could see the white walls of Morgan's farm on thehillside to the north, and on the south there was the stile with theview of old Mrs. Gibbon's cottage smoke; but down in the hollow, lookingover the gate, there was no hint of human work, except those green andantique battlements, on which the oaks stood in circle, guarding theinner wood.

　　The ring of the fort drew him with stronger fascination during that hotAugust weather. Standing, or as his headmaster would have said, "mooning"by the gate, and looking into that enclosed and secret valley, it seemedto his fancy as if there were a halo about the hill, an aureole thatplayed like flame around it. One afternoon as he gazed from his stationby the gate the sheer sides and the swelling bulwarks were more than everthings of enchantment; the green oak ring stood out against the sky asstill and bright as in a picture, and Lucian, in spite of his respect forthe law of trespass, slid over the gate. The farmers and their men werebusy on the uplands with the harvest, and the adventure was irresistible.At first he stole along by the brook in the shadow of the alders, wherethe grass and the flowers of wet meadows grew richly; but as he drewnearer to the fort, and its height now rose sheer above him, he left allshelter, and began desperately to mount. There was not a breath of wind;the sunlight shone down on the bare hillside; the loud chirp of thegrasshoppers was the only sound. It was a steep ascent and grew steeperas the valley sank away. He turned for a moment, and looked down towardsthe stream which now seemed to wind remote between the alders; above thevalley there were small dark figures moving in the cornfield, and now andagain there came the faint echo of a high-pitched voice singing throughthe air as on a wire. He was wet with heat; the sweat streamed off hisface, and he could feel it trickling all over his body. But above him thegreen bastions rose defiant, and the dark ring of oaks promised coolness.He pressed on, and higher, and at last began to crawl up the vallum, onhands and knees, grasping the turf and here and there the roots that hadburst through the red earth. And then he lay, panting with deep breaths,on the summit.

　　Within the fort it was all dusky and cool and hollow; it was as if onestood at the bottom of a great cup. Within, the wall seemed higher thanwithout, and the ring of oaks curved up like a dark green vault. Therewere nettles growing thick and rank in the foss; they looked differentfrom the common nettles in the lanes, and Lucian, letting his hand toucha leaf by accident, felt the sting burn like fire. Beyond the ditch therewas an undergrowth, a dense thicket of trees, stunted and old, crookedand withered by the winds into awkward and ugly forms; beech and oak andhazel and ash and yew twisted and so shortened and deformed that eachseemed, like the nettle, of no common kind. He began to fight his waythrough the ugly growth, stumbling and getting hard knocks from therebound of twisted boughs. His foot struck once or twice againstsomething harder than wood, and looking down he saw stones white with theleprosy of age, but still showing the work of the axe. And farther, theroots of the stunted trees gripped the foot-high relics of a wall; and around heap of fallen stones nourished rank, unknown herbs, that smeltpoisonous. The earth was black and unctuous, and bubbling under the feet,left no track behind. From it, in the darkest places where the shadow wasthickest, swelled the growth of an abominable fungus, making the stillair sick with its corrupt odor, and he shuddered as he felt the horriblething pulped beneath his feet. Then there was a gleam of sunlight, and ashe thrust the last boughs apart, he stumbled into the open space in theheart of the camp. It was a lawn of sweet close turf in the center of thematted brake, of clean firm earth from which no shameful growth sprouted,and near the middle of the glade was a stump of a felled yew-tree, leftuntrimmed by the woodman. Lucian thought it must have been made for aseat; a crooked bough through which a little sap still ran was a supportfor the back, and he sat down and rested after his toil. It was notreally so comfortable a seat as one of the school forms, but thesatisfaction was to find anything at all that would serve for a chair. Hesat there, still panting after the climb and his struggle through thedank and jungle-like thicket, and he felt as if he were growing hotterand hotter; the sting of the nettle was burning his hand, and thetingling fire seemed to spread all over his body.

　　Suddenly, he knew that he was alone. Not merely solitary; that he hadoften been amongst the woods and deep in the lanes; but now it was awholly different and a very strange sensation. He thought of the valleywinding far below him, all its fields by the brook green and peaceful andstill, without path or track. Then he had climbed the abrupt surge of thehill, and passing the green and swelling battlements, the ring of oaks,and the matted thicket, had come to the central space. And behind therewere, he knew, many desolate fields, wild as common, untrodden,unvisited. He was utterly alone. He still grew hotter as he sat on thestump, and at last lay down at full length on the soft grass, and more athis ease felt the waves of heat pass over his body.

　　And then he began to dream, to let his fancies stray over half-imagined,delicious things, indulging a virgin mind in its wanderings. The hot airseemed to beat upon him in palpable waves, and the nettle sting tingledand itched intolerably; and he was alone upon the fairy hill, within thegreat mounds, within the ring of oaks, deep in the heart of the mattedthicket. Slowly and timidly he began to untie his boots, fumbling withthe laces, and glancing all the while on every side at the ugly misshapentrees that hedged the lawn. Not a branch was straight, not one was free,but all were interlaced and grew one about another; and just aboveground, where the cankered stems joined the protuberant roots, there wereforms that imitated the human shape, and faces and twining limbs thatamazed him. Green mosses were hair, and tresses were stark in greylichen; a twisted root swelled into a limb; in the hollows of the rottedbark he saw the masks of men. His eyes were fixed and fascinated by thesimulacra of the wood, and could not see his hands, and so at last, andsuddenly, it seemed, he lay in the sunlight, beautiful with his oliveskin, dark haired, dark eyed, the gleaming bodily vision of a strayedfaun.

　　Quick flames now quivered in the substance of his nerves, hints ofmysteries, secrets of life passed trembling through his brain, unknowndesires stung him. As he gazed across the turf and into the thicket, thesunshine seemed really to become green, and the contrast between thebright glow poured on the lawn and the black shadow of the brake made anodd flickering light, in which all the grotesque postures of stem androot began to stir; the wood was alive. The turf beneath him heaved andsank as with the deep swell of the sea. He fell asleep, and lay still onthe grass, in the midst of the thicket.

　　He found out afterwards that he must have slept for nearly an hour. Theshadows had changed when he awoke; his senses came to him with a suddenshock, and he sat up and stared at his bare limbs in stupid amazement. Hehuddled on his clothes and laced his boots, wondering what folly hadbeset him. Then, while he stood indecisive, hesitating, his brain a whirlof puzzled thought, his body trembling, his hands shaking; as withelectric heat, sudden remembrance possessed him. A flaming blush shonered on his cheeks, and glowed and thrilled through his limbs. As heawoke, a brief and slight breeze had stirred in a nook of the mattedboughs, and there was a glinting that might have been the flash of suddensunlight across shadow, and the branches rustled and murmured for amoment, perhaps at the wind's passage.

　　He stretched out his hands, and cried to his visitant to return; heentreated the dark eyes that had shone over him, and the scarlet lipsthat had kissed him. And then panic fear rushed into his heart, and heran blindly, dashing through the wood. He climbed the vallum, andlooked out, crouching, lest anybody should see him. Only the shadows werechanged, and a breath of cooler air mounted from the brook; the fieldswere still and peaceful, the black figures moved, far away, amidst thecorn, and the faint echo of the high-pitched voices sang thin and distanton the evening wind. Across the stream, in the cleft on the hill,opposite to the fort, the blue wood smoke stole up a spiral pillar fromthe chimney of old Mrs. Gibbon's cottage. He began to run full tilt downthe steep surge of the hill, and never stopped till he was over the gateand in the lane again. As he looked back, down the valley to the south,and saw the violent ascent, the green swelling bulwarks, and the darkring of oaks; the sunlight seemed to play about the fort with an aureoleof flame.

　　"Where on earth have you been all this time, Lucian?" said his cousinwhen he got home. "Why, you look quite ill. It is really madness of youto go walking in such weather as this. I wonder you haven't got asunstroke. And the tea must be nearly cold. I couldn't keep your fatherwaiting, you know."

　　He muttered something about being rather tired, and sat down to his tea.It was not cold, for the "cozy" had been put over the pot, but it wasblack and bitter strong, as his cousin expressed it. The draught wasunpalatable, but it did him good, and the thought came with greatconsolation that he had only been asleep and dreaming queer, nightmarishdreams. He shook off all his fancies with resolution, and thought theloneliness of the camp, and the burning sunlight, and possibly the nettlesting, which still tingled most abominably, must have been the onlyfactors in his farrago of impossible recollections. He remembered thatwhen he had felt the sting, he had seized a nettle with thick folds ofhis handkerchief, and having twisted off a good length, and put it in hispocket to show his father. Mr. Taylor was almost interested when he camein from his evening stroll about the garden and saw the specimen.

　　"Where did you manage to come across that, Lucian?" he said. "You haven'tbeen to Caermaen, have you?"

　　"No. I got it in the Roman fort by the common."

　　"Oh, the twyn. You must have been trespassing then. Do you know what itis?"

　　"No. I thought it looked different from the common nettles."

　　"Yes; it's a Roman nettle—arctic pilulifera. It's a rare plant.Burrows says it's to be found at Caermaen, but I was never able to comeacross it. I must add it to the flora of the parish."

　　Mr. Taylor had begun to compile a flora accompanied by a hortussiccus, but both stayed on high shelves dusty and fragmentary. He putthe specimen on his desk, intending to fasten it in the book, but themaid swept it away, dry and withered, in a day or two.

　　Lucian tossed and cried out in his sleep that night, and the awakening inthe morning was, in a measure, a renewal of the awakening in the fort.But the impression was not so strong, and in a plain room it seemed alldelirium, a phantasmagoria. He had to go down to Caermaen in theafternoon, for Mrs. Dixon, the vicar's wife, had "commanded" his presenceat tea. Mr. Dixon, though fat and short and clean shaven, ruddy of face,was a safe man, with no extreme views on anything. He "deplored" allextreme party convictions, and thought the great needs of our belovedChurch were conciliation, moderation, and above all "amolgamation"—so hepronounced the word. Mrs. Dixon was tall, imposing, splendid, well fittedfor the Episcopal order, with gifts that would have shone at the palace.There were daughters, who studied German Literature, and thought MissFrances Ridley Havergal wrote poetry, but Lucian had no fear of them; hedreaded the boys. Everybody said they were such fine, manly fellows, suchgentlemanly boys, with such a good manner, sure to get on in the world.Lucian had said "Bother!" in a very violent manner when the graciousinvitation was conveyed to him, but there was no getting out of it. MissDeacon did her best to make him look smart; his ties were all sodisgraceful that she had to supply the want with a narrow ribbon of asky-blue tint; and she brushed him so long and so violently that he quiteunderstood why a horse sometimes bites and sometimes kicks the groom. Heset out between two and three in a gloomy frame of mind; he knew too wellwhat spending the afternoon with honest manly boys meant. He found thereality more lurid than his anticipation. The boys were in the field, andthe first remark he heard when he got in sight of the group was:

　　"Hullo, Lucian, how much for the tie?" "Fine tie," another, a stranger,observed. "You bagged it from the kitten, didn't you?"

　　Then they made up a game of cricket, and he was put in first. He wasl.b.w. in his second over, so they all said, and had to field for therest of the afternoon. Arthur Dixon, who was about his own age,forgetting all the laws of hospitality, told him he was a beastly muffwhen he missed a catch, rather a difficult catch. He missed severalcatches, and it seemed as if he were always panting after balls, which,as Edward Dixon said, any fool, even a baby, could have stopped. At lastthe game broke up, solely from Lucian's lack of skill, as everybodydeclared. Edward Dixon, who was thirteen, and had a swollen red face anda projecting eye, wanted to fight him for spoiling the game, and theothers agreed that he funked the fight in a rather dirty manner. Thestrange boy, who was called De Carti, and was understood to be faintlyrelated to Lord De Carti of M'Carthytown, said openly that the fellows athis place wouldn't stand such a sneak for five minutes. So the afternoonpassed off very pleasantly indeed, till it was time to go into thevicarage for weak tea, homemade cake, and unripe plums. He got away atlast. As he went out at the gate, he heard De Carti's final observation:

　　"We like to dress well at our place. His governor must be beastly poor tolet him go about like that. D'y' see his trousers are all ragged at heel?Is old Taylor a gentleman?"

　　It had been a very gentlemanly afternoon, but there was a certain reliefwhen the vicarage was far behind, and the evening smoke of the littletown, once the glorious capital of Siluria, hung haze-like over theragged roofs and mingled with the river mist. He looked down from theheight of the road on the huddled houses, saw the points of light startout suddenly from the cottages on the hillside beyond, and gazed at thelong lovely valley fading in the twilight, till the darkness came and allthat remained was the somber ridge of the forest. The way was pleasantthrough the solemn scented lane, with glimpses of dim country, the vaguemystery of night overshadowing the woods and meadows. A warm wind blewgusts of odor from the meadowsweet by the brook, now and then bee andbeetle span homeward through the air, booming a deep note as from a greatorgan far away, and from the verge of the wood came the "who-oo, who-oo,who-oo" of the owls, a wild strange sound that mingled with the whirr andrattle of the night-jar, deep in the bracken. The moon swam up throughthe films of misty cloud, and hung, a golden glorious lantern, inmid-air; and, set in the dusky hedge, the little green fires of theglowworms appeared. He sauntered slowly up the lane, drinking in thereligion of the scene, and thinking the country by night as mystic andwonderful as a dimly-lit cathedral. He had quite forgotten the "manlyyoung fellows" and their sports, and only wished as the land began toshimmer and gleam in the moonlight that he knew by some medium of wordsor color how to represent the loveliness about his way.

　　"Had a pleasant evening, Lucian?" said his father when he came in.

　　"Yes, I had a nice walk home. Oh, in the afternoon we played cricket. Ididn't care for it much. There was a boy named De Carti there; he isstaying with the Dixons. Mrs. Dixon whispered to me when we were going into tea, 'He's a second cousin of Lord De Carti's,' and she looked quitegrave as if she were in church."

　　The parson grinned grimly and lit his old pipe.

　　"Baron De Carti's great-grandfather was a Dublin attorney," he remarked."Which his name was Jeremiah M'Carthy. His prejudiced fellow-citizenscalled him the Unjust Steward, also the Bloody Attorney, and I believethat 'to hell with M'Carthy' was quite a popular cry about the time ofthe Union."

　　Mr. Taylor was a man of very wide and irregular reading and a tenaciousmemory; he often used to wonder why he had not risen in the Church. Hehad once told Mr. Dixon a singular and drolatique anecdote concerningthe bishop's college days, and he never discovered why the prelate didnot bow according to his custom when the name of Taylor was called at thenext visitation. Some people said the reason was lighted candles, butthat was impossible, as the Reverend and Honorable Smallwood Stafford,Lord Beamys's son, who had a cure of souls in the cathedral city, waswell known to burn no end of candles, and with him the bishop was on thebest of terms. Indeed the bishop often stayed at Coplesey (pronounced"Copsey") Hall, Lord Beamys's place in the west.

　　Lucian had mentioned the name of De Carti with intention, and had perhapsexaggerated a little Mrs. Dixon's respectful manner. He knew suchincidents cheered his father, who could never look at these subjects froma proper point of view, and, as people said, sometimes made the strangestremarks for a clergyman. This irreverent way of treating serious thingswas one of the great bonds between father and son, but it tended toincrease their isolation. People said they would often have liked toasked Mr. Taylor to garden-parties, and tea-parties, and other cheapentertainments, if only he had not been such an extreme man and soqueer. Indeed, a year before, Mr. Taylor had gone to a garden-party atthe Castle, Caermaen, and had made such fun of the bishop's recentaddress on missions to the Portuguese, that the Gervases and Dixons andall who heard him were quite shocked and annoyed. And, as Mrs. Meyrick ofLanyravon observed, his black coat was perfectly green with age; so onthe whole the Gervases did not like to invite Mr. Taylor again. As forthe son, nobody cared to have him; Mrs. Dixon, as she said to herhusband, really asked him out of charity.

　　"I am afraid he seldom gets a real meal at home," she remarked, "so Ithought he would enjoy a good wholesome tea for once in a way. But he issuch an unsatisfactory boy, he would only have one slice of that niceplain cake, and I couldn't get him to take more than two plums. They werereally quite ripe too, and boys are usually so fond of fruit."

　　Thus Lucian was forced to spend his holidays chiefly in his own company,and make the best he could of the ripe peaches on the south wall of therectory garden. There was a certain corner where the heat of that hotAugust seemed concentrated, reverberated from one wall to the other, andhere he liked to linger of mornings, when the mists were still thick inthe valleys, "mooning," meditating, extending his walk from the quince tothe medlar and back again, beside the moldering walls of mellowed brick.He was full of a certain wonder and awe, not unmixed with a swell ofstrange exultation, and wished more and more to be alone, to think overthat wonderful afternoon within the fort. In spite of himself theimpression was fading; he could not understand that feeling of mad panicterror that drove him through the thicket and down the steep hillside;yet, he had experienced so clearly the physical shame and reluctance ofthe flesh; he recollected that for a few seconds after his awakening thesight of his own body had made him shudder and writhe as if it hadsuffered some profoundest degradation. He saw before him a vision of twoforms; a faun with tingling and prickling flesh lay expectant in thesunlight, and there was also the likeness of a miserable shamed boy,standing with trembling body and shaking, unsteady hands. It was allconfused, a procession of blurred images, now of rapture and ecstasy,and now of terror and shame, floating in a light that was altogetherphantasmal and unreal. He dared not approach the fort again; he lingeredin the road to Caermaen that passed behind it, but a mile away, andseparated by the wild land and a strip of wood from the toweringbattlements. Here he was looking over a gate one day, doubtful andwondering, when he heard a heavy step behind him, and glancing roundquickly saw it was old Morgan of the White House.

　　"Good afternoon, Master Lucian," he began. "Mr. Taylor pretty well, Isuppose? I be goin' to the house a minute; the men in the fields arewantin' some more cider. Would you come and taste a drop of cider, MasterLucian? It's very good, sir, indeed."

　　Lucian did not want any cider, but he thought it would please old Morganif he took some, so he said he should like to taste the cider very muchindeed. Morgan was a sturdy, thick-set old man of the ancient stock; astiff churchman, who breakfasted regularly on fat broth and Caerphillycheese in the fashion of his ancestors; hot, spiced elder wine was forwinter nights, and gin for festal seasons. The farm had always been thefreehold of the family, and when Lucian, in the wake of the yeoman,passed through the deep porch by the oaken door, down into the long darkkitchen, he felt as though the seventeenth century still lingered on. Onemullioned window, set deep in the sloping wall, gave all the light therewas through quarries of thick glass in which there were whorls andcircles, so that the lapping rose-branch and the garden and the fieldsbeyond were distorted to the sight. Two heavy beams, oaken butwhitewashed, ran across the ceiling; a little glow of fire sparkled inthe great fireplace, and a curl of blue smoke fled up the cavern of thechimney. Here was the genuine chimney-corner of our fathers; there wereseats on each side of the fireplace where one could sit snug andsheltered on December nights, warm and merry in the blazing light, andlisten to the battle of the storm, and hear the flame spit and hiss atthe falling snowflakes. At the back of the fire were great blackenedtiles with raised initials and a date.—I.M., 1684.

　　"Sit down, Master Lucian, sit down, sir," said Morgan.

　　"Annie," he called through one of the numerous doors, "here's MasterLucian, the parson, would like a drop of cider. Fetch a jug, will you,directly?"

　　"Very well, father," came the voice from the dairy and presently the girlentered, wiping the jug she held. In his boyish way Lucian had been agood deal disturbed by Annie Morgan; he could see her on Sundays from hisseat in church, and her skin, curiously pale, her lips that seemed asthough they were stained with some brilliant pigment, her black hair, andthe quivering black eyes, gave him odd fancies which he had hardly shapedto himself. Annie had grown into a woman in three years, and he was stilla boy. She came into the kitchen, curtsying and smiling.

　　"Good-day, Master Lucian, and how is Mr. Taylor, sir?"

　　"Pretty well, thank you. I hope you are well."

　　"Nicely, sir, thank you. How nice your voice do sound in church, Master

　　Lucian, to be sure. I was telling father about it last Sunday."

　　Lucian grinned and felt uncomfortable, and the girl set down the jug onthe round table and brought a glass from the dresser. She bent close overhim as she poured out the green oily cider, fragrant of the orchard; herhand touched his shoulder for a moment, and she said, "I beg your pardon,sir," very prettily. He looked up eagerly at her face; the black eyes, alittle oval in shape, were shining, and the lips smiled. Annie wore aplain dress of some black stuff, open at the throat; her skin wasbeautiful. For a moment the ghost of a fancy hovered unsubstantial in hismind; and then Annie curtsied as she handed him the cider, and replied tohis thanks with, "And welcome kindly, sir."

　　The drink was really good; not thin, nor sweet, but round and full andgenerous, with a fine yellow flame twinkling through the green when oneheld it up to the light. It was like a stray sunbeam hovering on thegrass in a deep orchard, and he swallowed the glassful with relish, andhad some more, warmly commending it. Mr. Morgan was touched.

　　"I see you do know a good thing, sir," he said. "Is, indeed, now, it'sgood stuff, though it's my own makin'. My old grandfather he planted thetrees in the time of the wars, and he was a very good judge of an applein his day and generation. And a famous grafter he was, to be sure. Youwill never see no swelling in the trees he grafted at all whatever. Nowthere's James Morris, Penyrhaul, he's a famous grafter, too, and yet themRedstreaks he grafted for me five year ago, they be all swollen-likebelow the graft already. Would you like to taste a Blemmin pippin, now,Master Lucian? there be a few left in the loft, I believe."

　　Lucian said he should like an apple very much, and the farmer went out byanother door, and Annie stayed in the kitchen talking. She said Mrs.Trevor, her married sister, was coming to them soon to spend a few days.

　　"She's got such a beautiful baby," said Annie, "and he's quitesensible-like already, though he's only nine months old. Mary would liketo see you, sir, if you would be so kind as to step in; that is, if it'snot troubling you at all, Master Lucian. I suppose you must be getting afine scholar now, sir?"

　　"I am doing pretty well, thank you," said the boy. "I was first in myform last term."

　　"Fancy! To think of that! D'you hear, father, what a scholar Master

　　Lucian be getting?"

　　"He be a rare grammarian, I'm sure," said the farmer. "You do take afteryour father, sir; I always do say that nobody have got such a gooddeliverance in the pulpit."

　　Lucian did not find the Blenheim Orange as good as the cider, but he ateit with all the appearance of relish, and put another, with thanks, inhis pocket. He thanked the farmer again when he got up to go; and Anniecurtsied and smiled, and wished him good-day, and welcome, kindly.

　　Lucian heard her saying to her father as he went out what a nice-manneredyoung gentleman he was getting, to be sure; and he went on his way,thinking that Annie was really very pretty, and speculating as to whetherhe would have the courage to kiss her, if they met in a dark lane. He wasquite sure she would only laugh, and say, "Oh, Master Lucian!"

　　For many months he had occasional fits of recollection, both cold andhot; but the bridge of time, gradually lengthening, made those dreadfuland delicious images grow more and more indistinct, till at last they allpassed into that wonderland which a youth looks back upon in amazement,not knowing why this used to be a symbol of terror or that of joy. At theend of each term he would come home and find his father a little moredespondent, and harder to cheer even for a moment; and the wall paper andthe furniture grew more and more dingy and shabby. The two cats, lovedand ancient beasts, that he remembered when he was quite a little boy,before he went to school, died miserably, one after the other. Old Polly,the pony, at last fell down in the stable from the weakness of old age,and had to be killed there; the battered old trap ran no longer along thewell-remembered lanes. There was long meadow grass on the lawn, and thetrained fruit trees on the wall had got quite out of hand. At last, whenLucian was seventeen, his father was obliged to take him from school; hecould no longer afford the fees. This was the sorry ending of many hopes,and dreams of a double-first, a fellowship, distinction and glory thatthe poor parson had long entertained for his son, and the two mopedtogether, in the shabby room, one on each side of the sulky fire,thinking of dead days and finished plans, and seeing a grey future in theyears that advanced towards them. At one time there seemed some chance ofa distant relative coming forward to Lucian's assistance; and indeed itwas quite settled that he should go up to London with certain definiteaims. Mr. Taylor told the good news to his acquaintances—his coat wastoo green now for any pretence of friendship; and Lucian himself spoke ofhis plans to Burrows the doctor and Mr. Dixon, and one or two others.Then the whole scheme fell through, and the parson and his son sufferedmuch sympathy. People, of course, had to say they were sorry, but inreality the news was received with high spirits, with the joy with whichone sees a stone, as it rolls down a steep place, give yet anotherbounding leap towards the pool beneath. Mrs. Dixon heard the pleasanttidings from Mrs. Colley, who came in to talk about the Mothers' Meetingand the Band of Hope. Mrs. Dixon was nursing little Athelwig, or somesuch name, at the time, and made many affecting observations on thegeneral righteousness with which the world was governed. Indeed, poorLucian's disappointment seemed distinctly to increase her faith in theDivine Order, as if it had been some example in Butler's Analogy.

　　"Aren't Mr. Taylor's views very extreme?" she said to her husband thesame evening.

　　"I am afraid they are," he replied. "I was quite grieved at the lastDiocesan Conference at the way in which he spoke. The dear old bishop hadgiven an address on Auricular Confession; he was forced to do so, youknow, after what had happened, and I must say that I never felt prouderof our beloved Church."

　　Mr. Dixon told all the Homeric story of the conference, reciting theachievements of the champions, "deploring" this and applauding that. Itseemed that Mr. Taylor had had the audacity to quote authorities whichthe bishop could not very well repudiate, though they were directlyopposed to the "safe" Episcopal pronouncement.

　　Mrs. Dixon of course was grieved; it was "sad" to think of a clergymanbehaving so shamefully.

　　"But you know, dear," she proceeded, "I have been thinking about thatunfortunate Taylor boy and his disappointments, and after what you'vejust told me, I am sure it's some kind of judgment on them both. Has Mr.Taylor forgotten the vows he took at his ordination? But don't you think,dear, I am right, and that he has been punished: 'The sins of thefathers'?"

　　Somehow or other Lucian divined the atmosphere of threatenings andjudgments, and shrank more and more from the small society of thecountryside. For his part, when he was not "mooning" in the belovedfields and woods of happy memory, he shut himself up with books, readingwhatever could be found on the shelves, and amassing a store ofincongruous and obsolete knowledge. Long did he linger with the men ofthe seventeenth century; delaying the gay sunlit streets with Pepys, andlistening to the charmed sound of the Restoration Revel; roaming bypeaceful streams with Izaak Walton, and the great Catholic divines;enchanted with the portrait of Herbert the loving ascetic; awed by themystic breath of Crashaw. Then the cavalier poets sang their gallantsongs; and Herrick made Dean Prior magic ground by the holy incantationof a verse. And in the old proverbs and homely sayings of the time hefound the good and beautiful English life, a time full of grace anddignity and rich merriment. He dived deeper and deeper into his books; hehad taken all obsolescence to be his province; in his disgust at thestupid usual questions, "Will it pay?" "What good is it?" and so forth,he would only read what was uncouth and useless. The strange pomp andsymbolism of the Cabala, with its hint of more terrible things; theRosicrucian mysteries of Fludd, the enigmas of Vaughan, dreams ofalchemists—all these were his delight. Such were his companions, withthe hills and hanging woods, the brooks and lonely waterpools; books, thethoughts of books, the stirrings of imagination, all fused into onephantasy by the magic of the outland country. He held himself aloof fromthe walls of the fort; he was content to see the heaped mounds, theviolent height with faerie bulwarks, from the gate in the lane, and toleave all within the ring of oaks in the mystery of his boyhood's vision.He professed to laugh at himself and at his fancies of that hot Augustafternoon, when sleep came to him within the thicket, but in his heart ofhearts there was something that never faded—something that glowed likethe red glint of a gypsy's fire seen from afar across the hills and mistsof the night, and known to be burning in a wild land. Sometimes, when hewas sunken in his books, the flame of delight shot up, and showed him awhole province and continent of his nature, all shining and aglow; and inthe midst of the exultation and triumph he would draw back, a littleafraid. He had become ascetic in his studious and melancholy isolation,and the vision of such ecstasies frightened him. He began to write alittle; at first very tentatively and feebly, and then with moreconfidence. He showed some of his verses to his father, who told him witha sigh that he had once hoped to write—in the old days at Oxford, headded.

　　"They are very nicely done," said the parson; "but I'm afraid you won'tfind anybody to print them, my boy."

　　So he pottered on; reading everything, imitating what struck his fancy,attempting the effect of the classic meters in English verse, trying hishand at a masque, a Restoration comedy, forming impossible plans forbooks which rarely got beyond half a dozen lines on a sheet of paper;beset with splendid fancies which refused to abide before the pen. Butthe vain joy of conception was not altogether vain, for it gave him somearmor about his heart.

　　The months went by, monotonous, and sometimes blotted with despair. Hewrote and planned and filled the waste-paper basket with hopelessefforts. Now and then he sent verses or prose articles to magazines, inpathetic ignorance of the trade. He felt the immense difficulty of thecareer of literature without clearly understanding it; the battle washappily in a mist, so that the host of the enemy, terribly arrayed, wasto some extent hidden. Yet there was enough of difficulty to appall; fromfollowing the intricate course of little nameless brooks, from hushedtwilight woods, from the vision of the mountains, and the breath of thegreat wind, passing from deep to deep, he would come home filled withthoughts and emotions, mystic fancies which he yearned to translate intothe written word. And the result of the effort seemed always to bebathos! Wooden sentences, a portentous stilted style, obscurity, andawkwardness clogged the pen; it seemed impossible to win the great secretof language; the stars glittered only in the darkness, and vanished awayin clearer light. The periods of despair were often long and heavy, thevictories very few and trifling; night after night he sat writing afterhis father had knocked out his last pipe, filling a page with difficultyin an hour, and usually forced to thrust the stuff away in despair, andgo unhappily to bed, conscious that after all his labor he had donenothing. And these were moments when the accustomed vision of the landalarmed him, and the wild domed hills and darkling woods seemed symbolsof some terrible secret in the inner life of that stranger—himself.Sometimes when he was deep in his books and papers, sometimes on a lonelywalk, sometimes amidst the tiresome chatter of Caermaen "society," hewould thrill with a sudden sense of awful hidden things, and there ranthat quivering flame through his nerves that brought back therecollection of the matted thicket, and that earlier appearance of thebare black boughs enwrapped with flames. Indeed, though he avoided thesolitary lane, and the sight of the sheer height, with its ring of oaksand molded mounds, the image of it grew more intense as the symbol ofcertain hints and suggestions. The exultant and insurgent flesh seemed tohave its temple and castle within those olden walls, and he longed withall his heart to escape, to set himself free in the wilderness of London,and to be secure amidst the murmur of modern streets.