The Music on the Hill

by H.H. Munro (SAKI)

Sylvia Seltoun ate her breakfast in the morning-room at Yessney with a pleasantsense of ultimate victory, such as a fervent Ironside might have permittedhimself on the morrow of Worcester fight. She was scarcely pugnacious bytemperament, but belonged to that more successful class of fighters who arepugnacious by circumstance. Fate had willed that her life should be occupiedwith 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 thatshe had brought her hardest and certainly her most important struggle to asuccessful issue. To have married Mortimer Seltoun, "Dead Mortimer" as his moreintimate 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 achievementthat had needed some determination and adroitness to carry through; yesterdayshe had brought her victory to its concluding stage by wrenching her husbandaway from Town and its group of satellite watering-places and "settling himdown," in the vocabulary of her kind, in this remote wood-girt manor farm whichwas his country house."You will never get Mortimer to go," his mother had said carpingly, "but if heonce goes he'll stay; Yessney throws almost as much a spell over him as Towndoes. One can understand what holds him to Town, but Yessney--" and the dowagerhad shrugged her shoulders.There was a sombre almost savage wildness about Yessney that was certainly notlikely to appeal to town-bred tastes, and Sylvia, notwithstanding her name, wasaccustomed to nothing much more sylvan than "leafy Kensington." She looked onthe country as something excellent and wholesome in its way, which was apt tobecome troublesome if you encouraged it overmuch. Distrust of townlife had beena new thing with her, born of her marriage with Mortimer, and she had watchedwith 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 themyesternight. Her will-power and strategy had prevailed; Mortimer would stay.Outside the morning-room windows was a triangular slope of turf, which theindulgent might call a lawn, and beyond its low hedge of neglected fuschiabushes a steeper slope of heather and bracken dropped down into cavernous combesovergrown with oak and yew. In its wild open savagery there seemed a stealthylinking of the joy of life with the terror of unseen things. Sylvia smiledcomplacently 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 almostthink 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 havedrawn aside his votaries from time to time, but he is the Nature-God to whom allmust come back at last. He has been called the Father of all the Gods, but mostof his children have been stillborn."Sylvia was religious in an honest, vaguely devotional kind of way, and did notlike to hear her beliefs spoken of as mere aftergrowths, but it was at leastsomething new and hopeful to hear Dead Mortimer speak with such energy andconviction 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 afool as not to believe in Pan when I'm down here. And if you're wise you won'tdisbelieve in him too boastfully while you're in his country."It was not till a week later, when Sylvia had exhausted the attractions of thewoodland walks round Yessney, that she ventured on a tour of inspection of thefarm buildings. A farmyard suggested in her mind a scene of cheerful bustle,with churns and flails and smiling dairymaids, and teams of horses drinkingknee-deep in duck-crowded ponds. As she wandered among the gaunt grey buildingsof Yessney manor farm her first impression was one of crushing stillness anddesolation, as though she had happened on some lone deserted homestead longgiven 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 andcoppices. From behind heavy doors and shuttered windows came the restless stampof hoof or rasp of chain halter, and at times a muffled bellow from some stalledbeast. From a distant comer a shaggy dog watched her with intent unfriendlyeyes; as she drew near it slipped quietly into its kennel, and slipped out againas noiselessly when she had passed by. A few hens, questing for food under arick, stole away under a gate at her approach. Sylvia felt that if she had comeacross any human beings in this wilderness of barn and byre they would have fledwraith-like from her gaze. At last, turning a corner quickly, she came upon aliving thing that did not fly from her. Astretch in a pool of mud was anenormous sow, gigantic beyond the town-woman's wildest computation of swine-flesh, and speedily alert to resent and if necessary repel the unwontedintrusion. It was Sylvia's turn to make an unobtrusive retreat. As she threadedher way past rickyards and cowsheds and long blank walls, she started suddenlyat 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 visiblyat 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 hiddenmockery that had ambushed Sylvia's retreat. The memory of that untraceable echowas added to her other impressions of a furtive sinister "something" that hungaround Yessney.Of Mortimer she saw very little; farm and woods and trout- streams seemed toswallow him up from dawn till dusk. Once, following the direction she had seenhim take in the morning, she came to an open space in a nut copse, further shutin by huge yew trees, in the centre of which stood a stone pedestal surmountedby a small bronze figure of a youthful Pan. It was a beautiful piece ofworkmanship, but her attention was chiefly held by the fact that a newly cutbunch of grapes had been placed as an offering at its feet. Grapes were none tooplentiful at the manor house, and Sylvia snatched the bunch angrily from thepedestal. Contemptuous annoyance dominated her thoughts as she strolled slowlyhomeward, and then gave way to a sharp feeling of something that was very nearfright; 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, allpathways round Yessney were lonely for the matter of that, and she sped forwardwithout waiting to give a closer scrutiny to this sudden apparition. It was nottill she had reached the house that she discovered that she had dropped thebunch of grapes in her flight."I saw a youth in the wood today," she told Mortimer that evening, "brown-facedand 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 theseparts at present.""Then who was he?" asked Sylvia, and as Mortimer appeared to have no theory ofhis 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, watchingMortimer's impassive face for a sign of annoyance."I don't think you were wise to do that," he said reflectively. "I've heard itsaid 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," retortedSylvia."All the same," said Mortimer in his even, dispassionate tone, "I should avoidthe woods and orchards if I were you, and give a wide berth to the horned beastson the farm."It was all nonsense, of course, but in that lonely wood-girt spot nonsenseseemed able to rear a bastard brood of uneasiness."Mortimer," said Sylvia suddenly, "I think we will go back to Town some timesoon."Her victory had not been so complete as she had supposed; it had carried her onto ground that she was already anxious to quit."I don't think you will ever go back to Town," said Mortimer. He seemed to beparaphrasing his mother's prediction as to himself.Sylvia noted with dissatisfaction and some self-contempt that the course of hernext afternoon's ramble took her instinctively clear of the network of woods. Asto the horned cattle, Mortimer's warning was scarcely needed, for she had alwaysregarded them as of doubtful neutrality at the best: her imagination unsexed the most matronly dairy cows and turned them into bulls liable to "seered" at any moment. The ram who fed in the narrow paddock below the orchards shehad adjudged, after ample and cautious probation, to be of docile temper; today,however, she decided to leave his docility untested, for the usually tranquilbeast was roaming with every sign of restlessness from corner to corner of hismeadow. A low, fitful piping, as of some reedy flute, was coming from the depthof a neighbouring copse, and there seemed to be some subtle connection betweenthe animal's restless pacing and the wild music from the wood. Sylvia turned hersteps in an upward direction and climbed the heather-clad slopes that stretchedin rolling shoulders high above Yessney. She had left the piping notes behindher, but across the wooded combes at her feet the wind brought her another kindof music, the straining bay of hounds in full chase. Yessney was just on theoutskirts of the Devon-and-Somerset country, and the hunted deer sometimes camethat way. Sylvia could presently see a dark body, breasting hill after hill, andsinking again and again out of sight as he crossed the combes, while behind himsteadily swelled that relentless chorus, and she grew tense with the excitedsympathy that one feels for any hunted thing in whose capture one is notdirectly interested. And at last he broke through the outermost line of oakscrub and fern and stood panting in the open, a fat September stag carrying awell-furnished head. His obvious course was to drop down to the brown pools ofUndercombe, 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 slopeand 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 musicof the pack seemed to have died away for a moment, and in its place she heardagain that wild piping, which rose now on this side, now on that, as thoughurging the failing stag to a final effort. Sylvia stood well aside from hispath, half hidden in a thick growth of whortle bushes, and watched him swingstiffly upward, his flanks dark with sweat, the coarse hair on his neck showinglight by contrast. The pipe music shrilled suddenly around her, seeming to comefrom the bushes at her very feet, and at the same moment the great beast slewedround and bore directly down upon her. In an instant her pity for the huntedanimal was changed to wild terror at her own danger; the thick heather rootsmocked her scrambling efforts at flight, and she looked frantically downward fora glimpse of oncoming hounds. The huge antler spikes were within a few yards ofher, and in a flash of numbing fear she remembered Mortimer's warning, to bewareof horned beasts on the farm. And then with a quick throb of joy she saw thatshe was not alone; a human figure stood a few paces aside, knee-deep in thewhortle 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 animalwas in her nostrils, but her eyes were filled with the horror of something shesaw other than her oncoming death. And in her ears rang the echo of a boy'slaughter, golden and equivocal.

Previous Authors：The Mouse Next Authors：The Name-Day