The Music on the Hill

by H.H. Munro (SAKI)

　　Sylvia Seltoun ate her breakfast in the morning-room at Yessneywith a pleasant sense of ultimate victory, such as a ferventIronside might have permitted himself on the morrow of Worcesterfight. She was scarcely pugnacious by temperament, but belongedto that more successful class of fighters who are pugnacious bycircumstance. Fate had willed that her life should be occupiedwith a series of small struggles, usually with the odds slightlyagainst her, and usually she had just managed to come throughwinning. And now she felt that she had brought her hardest andcertainly her most important struggle to a successful issue. Tohave married Mortimer Seltoun, "Dead Mortimer" as his moreintimate enemies called him, in the teeth of the cold hostility ofhis family, and in spite of his unaffected indifference to women,was indeed an achievement that had needed some determination andadroitness to carry through; yesterday she had brought her victoryto its concluding stage by wrenching her husband away from Townand its group of satellite watering-places and "settling himdown," in the vocabulary of her kind, in this remote wood-girtmanor farm which was his country house."You will never get Mortimer to go," his mother had saidcarpingly, "but if he once goes he'll stay; Yessney throws almostas much a spell over him as Town does. One can understand whatholds him to Town, but Yessney--" and the dowager had shrugged hershoulders.There was a sombre almost savage wildness about Yessney that wascertainly not likely to appeal to town-bred tastes, and Sylvia,notwithstanding her name, was accustomed to nothing much moresylvan than "leafy Kensington." She looked on the country assomething excellent and wholesome in its way, which was apt tobecome, troublesome if you encouraged it overmuch. Distrust oftown-life had been a new thing with her, born of her marriage withMortimer, and she had watched with satisfaction the gradual fadingof what she called "the Jermyn-street-look" in his eyes as thewoods 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 ofneglected fuchsia bushes a steeper slope of heather and brackendropped down into cavernous combes overgrown with oak and yew. Inits wild open savagery there seemed a stealthy linking of the joyof life with the terror of unseen things. Sylvia smiledcomplacently as she gazed with a School-of-Art appreciation at thelandscape, and then of a sudden she almost shuddered."It is very wild," she said to Mortimer, who had joined her; "onecould almost think that in such a place the worship of Pan hadnever quite died out.""The worship of Pan never has died out," said Mortimer. "Othernewer gods have drawn aside his votaries from time to time, but heis the Nature-God to whom all must come back at last. He has beencalled the Father of all the Gods, but most of his children havebeen stillborn."Sylvia was religious in an honest vaguely devotional kind of way,and did not like to hear her beliefs spoken of as mereaftergrowths, but it was at least something new and hopeful tohear Dead Mortimer speak with such energy and conviction on anysubject."You don't really believe in Pan?" she asked incredulously."I've been a fool in most things," said Mortimer quietly, "but I'mnot such a fool as not to believe in Pan when I'm down here. Andif you're wise you won't disbelieve in him too boastfully whileyou're in his country."It was not till a week later, when Sylvia had exhausted theattractions of the woodland walks round Yessney, that she venturedon a tour of inspection of the farm buildings. A farmyardsuggested in her mind a scene of cheerful bustle, with churns andflails and smiling dairymaids, and teams of horses drinking knee-deep in duck-crowded ponds. As she wandered among the gaunt greybuildings of Yessney manor farm her first impression was one ofcrushing stillness and desolation, as though she had happened onsome lone deserted homestead long given over to owls and cobwebs;then came a sense of furtive watchful hostility, the same shadowof unseen things that seemed to lurk in the wooded combes andcoppices. From behind heavy doors and shuttered windows came therestless stamp of hoof or rasp of chain halter, and at times amuffled bellow from some stalled beast. From a distant corner ashaggy dog watched her with intent unfriendly eyes; as she drewnear it slipped quietly into its kennel, and slipped out again asnoiselessly when she had passed by. A few hens, questing for foodunder a rick, stole away under a gate at her approach. Sylviafelt that if she had come across any human beings in thiswilderness of barn and byre they would have fled wraith-like fromher gaze. At last, turning a corner quickly, she came upon aliving thing that did not fly from her. Astretch in a pool of mudwas an enormous sow, gigantic beyond the town-woman's wildestcomputation of swine-flesh, and speedily alert to resent and ifnecessary repel the unwonted intrusion. It was Sylvia's turn tomake an unobtrusive retreat. As she threaded her way pastrickyards and cowsheds and long blank walls, she started suddenlyat a strange sound--the echo of a boy's laughter, golden andequivocal. Jan, the only boy employed on the farm, a towheaded,wizen-faced yokel, was visibly at work on a potato clearing half-way up the nearest hill-side, and Mortimer, when questioned, knewof no other probable or possible begetter of the hidden mockerythat had ambushed Sylvia's retreat. The memory of thatuntraceable echo was added to her other impressions of a furtivesinister "something " that hung around Yessney.Of Mortimer she saw very little; farm and woods and trout-streamsseemed to swallow him up from dawn till dusk. Once, following thedirection she had seen him take in the morning, she came to anopen space in a nut copse, further shut in by huge yew trees, inthe centre of which stood a stone pedestal surmounted by a smallbronze figure of a youthful Pan. It was a beautiful piece ofworkmanship, but her attention was chiefly held by the fact that anewly cut bunch of grapes had been placed as an offering at itsfeet. Grapes were none too plentiful at the manor house, andSylvia snatched the bunch angrily from the pedestal. Contemptuousannoyance dominated her thoughts as she strolled slowly homeward,and then gave way to a sharp feeling of something that was verynear fright; across a thick tangle of undergrowth a boy's face wasscowling at her, brown and beautiful, with unutterably evil eyes.It was a lonely pathway, all pathways round Yessney were lonelyfor the matter of that, and she sped forward without waiting togive a closer scrutiny to this sudden apparition. It was not tillshe had reached the house that she discovered that she had droppedthe bunch of grapes in her flight."I saw a youth in the wood to-day," she told Mortimer thatevening, "brown-faced and rather handsome, but a scoundrel to lookat. A gipsy lad, I suppose.""A reasonable theory," said Mortimer, "only there aren't anygipsies in these parts at present.""Then who was he?" asked Sylvia, and as Mortimer appeared to haveno theory of his own, she passed on to recount her finding of thevotive offering."I suppose it was your doing," she observed; "it's a harmlesspiece of lunacy, but people would think you dreadfully silly ifthey 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 tothose who molest them.""Horrible perhaps to those that believe in them, but you see Idon't," retorted Sylvia."All the same," said Mortimer in his even, dispassionate tone, "Ishould avoid the woods and orchards if I were you, and give a wideberth to the horned beasts on the farm."It was all nonsense, of course, but in that lonely wood-girt spotnonsense seemed able to rear a bastard brood of uneasiness."Mortimer," said Sylvia suddenly, "I think we will go back to Townsome time soon."Her victory had not been so complete as she had supposed; it hadcarried her on to ground that she was already anxious to quit."I don't think you will ever go back to Town," said Mortimer. Heseemed to be paraphrasing his mother's prediction as to himself.Sylvia noted with dissatisfaction and some self-contempt that thecourse of her next afternoon's ramble took her instinctively clearof the network of woods. As to the horned cattle, Mortimer'swarning was scarcely needed, for she had always regarded them asof doubtful neutrality at the best: her imagination unsexed themost matronly dairy cows and turned them into bulls liable to "seered" at any moment. The ram who fed in the narrow paddock belowthe orchards she had adjudged, after ample and cautious probation,to be of docile temper; to-day, however, she decided to leave hisdocility untested, for the usually tranquil beast was roaming withevery sign of restlessness from corner to corner of his meadow. Alow, fitful piping, as of some reedy flute, was coming from thedepth of a neighbouring copse, and there seemed to be some subtleconnection between the animal's restless pacing and the wild musicfrom the wood. Sylvia turned her steps in an upward direction andclimbed the heather-clad slopes that stretched in rollingshoulders high above Yessney. She had left the piping notesbehind her, but across the wooded combes at her feet the windbrought her another kind of music, the straining bay of hounds infull 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 shegrew tense with the excited sympathy that one feels for any huntedthing in whose capture one is not directly interested. And atlast he broke through the outermost line of oak scrub and fern andstood panting in the open, a fat September stag carrying a well-furnished head. His obvious course was to drop down to the brownpools of Undercombe, and thence make his way towards the reddeer's favoured sanctuary, the sea. To Sylvia's surprise,however, he turned his head to the upland slope and came lumberingresolutely onward over the heather. "It will be dreadful," shethought, "the hounds will pull him down under my very eyes." Butthe music of the pack seemed to have died away for a moment, andin its place she heard again that wild piping, which rose now onthis side, now on that, as though urging the failing stag to afinal effort. Sylvia stood well aside from his path, half hiddenin a thick growth of whortle bushes, and watched him swing stifflyupward, his flanks dark with sweat, the coarse hair on his neckshowing light by contrast. The pipe music shrilled suddenlyaround her, seeming to come from the bushes at her very feet, andat the same moment the great beast slewed round and bore directlydown upon her. In an instant her pity for the hunted animal waschanged to wild terror at her own danger; the thick heather rootsmocked her scrambling efforts at flight, and she lookedfrantically downward for a glimpse of oncoming hounds. The hugeantler spikes were within a few yards of her, and in a flash ofnumbing fear she remembered Mortimer's warning, to beware of homedbeasts on the farm. And then with a quick throb of joy she sawthat 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 answeringmovement.The antlers drove straight at her breast, the acrid smell of thehunted animal was in her nostrils, but her eyes were filled withthe horror of something she saw other than her oncoming death.And in her ears rang the echo of a boy's laughter, golden andequivocal.