OVERTURE

Inasmuch as Nature tells us there are Gods, and we know, by reason, what they must be like, so, with the consent of all rational beings, we believe souls to endure everlastingly; where, however, these spirits exist, and what they are like, we must discover by investigation.—Cicero.

The reverend Doctor Berry concluded to his satisfaction the single paragraph which was the result of a morning’s thought, wiped his pen, fingered the sheet of manuscript tenderly, and placed it carefully in a drawer of his desk, then rose and walked across to the open window.

The sun was setting upon beech woods, and a deep haze flecked with dust and white butterflies shimmered across a strip of garden, bright with poppies and cornflowers, which divided the rectory from the churchyard; the main portion of the garden stretched away behind the house, down a slope which ended in an orchard where a stream ran bounding the glebe in that direction. A crumbling wall, completely covered with ivy, marked the line where the consecrated ground ended; on the rectory side grew docks and nettles and red sorrels among the altar-tombs and mossy slabs, with here and there a black yew striking its roots deeply into the resting places of the dead. An unfrequented road passed beside the church, to become a mere cart-track upon the downs, where the white-thorn was being shed like snow and the shadows of the beech wood were lengthening fast.

“It is a glorious evening,” the rector whispered, “I will go and walk in the garden of the Strath.”

Taking a great key from an oak bracket he walked out of his study, placed a straw hat upon his silvered hair, and stepped into the glories of the failing day.

The ecclesiastical parish of Thorlund, scarcely worthy of being dignified by the title of hamlet, consisted of a wooded valley watered by a stream. Far down and buried amid elms were tiny church and parsonage; and hard by rose the inexplicable house, its garden surrounded by a time-worn wall, known to all as the Strath. A few cottages upon the Kingsmore road were passing into an advanced stage of decay. A few in a more habitable state were dotted singly, or in pairs, beside the grass by-paths or upon the lower ridges of the downs. The entire parish was moribund. Nothing flourished except the trees and strong-scented wayside weeds. No dignitary of the church had entered the valley for hard upon a century. A deadening influence prevailed over the church, pastor, and people. There were not thirty adults in the parish all told, and the nearest school was at Kingsmore four miles distant across the downs. A few peasant farmers clung to the chalky slopes because they lacked the means to go. The labourers were agricultural machines; the wives went out to work afield beside their husbands; and by day the sun smote across an altogether deserted prospect, where a lone cat slept on the dusty green, and a caged blackbird listened sadly and silently to its free brethren singing in the weird garden of the Strath.

Thorlund had in common with the world the sun which warmed it, the moon which ruled its night, the rain which coursed in milky rivulets down its stony roads, and the storm which broke its beeches and its elms—but nothing more. It was a peaceful, but not a happy valley. Its sleep was not a healthy one. Once, no doubt, Thorlund had lived, and in a sense flourished, then death came, but a spark of vital element had crept back to the body, diffusing itself throughout its entire system, and lending to it a semblance of life. It was from the long abandoned house known as the Strath that this vital and dramatic element proceeded. Dr. Berry served as the intermediary between the incomprehensible spirit of the Strath and those human beings who had their habitations near. He had remained untouched by the noise and trouble of the world. His life had moved smoothly from the cradle, and promised so to continue down to the grave. He had always been happier apart from others, living his own life which consisted in striving to materialize rather than dispel that atmosphere of mysticism which gathers around a scholar’s solitary existence. At Oxford he had worked for classical honours, not for the sake of reputation, but for the pure love of knowledge; and when at the age of twenty-five he had been offered the living of Thorlund, which nobody else could be induced to accept, he had merely asked, “What is the population of the parish?” The answer, “Fifty at the last census,” which had frightened away every one else, satisfied him. The stipend of forty-five pounds per annum was not a serious consideration, as he possessed means of his own. After passing through the divinity school with his customary display of polished scholarship, he accepted the “benefice”; and thirty years had passed him there, as so many uneventful weeks, while he built up slowly the work which it was his intention to bequeath to posterity as a justification for his existence, an analysis of the lyrical poetry of the Aeolians.

A drowsy rustling of foliage was blown with the chalk dust across the unused road to the parish church, as the scholar made his way through the churchyard towards an old oak door set into the grey wall, nearly twenty feet in height, with a coping of tiles the majority of which time and storm had worked awry. Pushing the key into the antique lock he opened the door communicating with the churchyard, and immediately found himself standing in the shadows of the old garden of the Strath.

Neither building nor grounds had been touched by the hand of man for more than a century. The romantic house, which bore the date 1670 above the arms of an extinct family graven upon a stone let into the masonry above the hall door, was of no great size; high rather than wide, and completely enveloped in ivy and other creepers from cellars to chimney stacks. The garden and orchard comprised six acres, bound by that great wall which had in no place fallen completely out of repair. The grass waved like corn along what had once been the drive, and the iron gates leading from the Kingsmore road were red and glued together with rust. Through these gates children often peered to catch glimpses of the sad house through the tangled growths; to watch the birds and insects sporting as in another and a stranger and more restless world. No one ever entered there except the rector. That wall could not be climbed. The old people of the hamlet would stare through the forbidding gates, and observe to each other that the flowers were extraordinary that season in the Strath—there were blooms in those jungles such as they had never seen elsewhere—or that the odour of the garden was wonderful, or that the Strath was noisy; and when the latter statement was in their mouths they realised dimly they were hinting at what they could not understand.

Yet the place had no evil reputation; the reverse rather. Mothers would quiet fractious children by promising that they should enter the mysterious garden some day, or threaten that if they were not good they could never hope to go to the Strath when they died. No wild stories dealing with phantasms or spirit lights were passed upon the village green. Not a tongue had ever been so bold as to suggest that the spiritual world had acquired a perpetual tenancy of the wild old place. The Strath had simply remained unentered and unused for over a century. The flowers and weeds fought together, the trees increased, the bushes spread, fruit formed, ripened, and dropped to rot year after year. And yet there was something about the place which made it unlike other deserted houses; something which did not appear to have its origin in the weedy circlet of water—for the Strath was a moated grange—nor in the jungle-like garden, nor in the damp and darkened house itself; but which had its being in the air, and in the clouds above, and in the wind around.

“No, Sir,” said Simcox the sexton, when Dr. Berry questioned him many years ago. “There ain’t nothing what you wight call gruesome about the old place that I’ve heard tell on. But it seems to me, Sir, that sometimes when the sun is bright ’tis wonderful happy in there, and when the wind is noisy ’tis awful solemn-like. I’ve been cutting that nettle patch along churchyard wall in summer, and had to stop and laugh out loud, and all for nought, Sir. And I’ve been sweeping leaves in autumn under the wall, and felt that miserable I could almost have cut my throat, or maybe somebody else’s throat, begging your reverence’s pardon for saying it.”

The young rector nodded his head gravely, and because he had a strong desire to obtain entrance into the mysterious garden, instituted a search for its owner. He succeeded in part. A firm of land agents in the neighbouring town supplied him with the address of a London lawyer; and when next in the metropolis Mr. Berry, as he then was, found his way into a stuffy office hard by Goldsmith’s memorial, where he was received by an old fashioned attorney, who replied in the affirmative when the rector of Thorlund asked whether he represented the owner of the Strath. As a result of that interview the rector was granted permission to enter the garden by the gate from the churchyard, on the condition that he would not lend the key, which was given him for that purpose, to others. He also received the information that the owner was abroad, and that the house was neither to be sold nor let.

“I will write to the owner, informing him that I have given you permission to use the garden,” the lawyer had said, as he accompanied his visitor to the door, “and if he objects you shall hear from me.”

Years went by, but the lawyer never wrote; and Dr. Berry walked in the garden every day, until the glamour of the place made him its slave; and after walking there, as along the unknown ways of another world, his work on Aeolian poetry escaped from the trammels of prose and became itself poetry, pierced through and through by the strange lights of romance; and he became still more a recluse; and the present world went away from him and was shrouded in the mists of unreality.

On many a bright day, when nature was revealed at her best, the poet would laugh and applaud, and even dance grotesquely along the paths of the Strath, his feet in time to a music which was in his brain but not in his ears. Was this mere animal enjoyment of life, or was it influence? Decidedly the latter. The odour of flowers and the giddy dance of insects were also controlled by that vital and dramatic element, to which the scholar could only give the name of comedy, a happiness tinged slightly with the knowledge of mortality. And when the day was sad with wind, the opposing note of tragedy was struck throughout the garden; and that fatality which dominated the Attic drama, the struggle of terrible human passions in the wind and rain, the falling of life before unpitying destiny, controlled his sensitive mind. Dr. Berry had suffered when the elements fought above his head, blending with the influence, which bade him seek out the man hated by the immortals and slay him without shame. Then was the knowledge swept upon the poet that he was an intermediary between seen and unseen, and thus an agent for the effectual working out of the tragedy of justice.

The influence at work within the high wall which fastened about the Strath was therefore twofold, that of the sun, and that of the storm; the former a comedy, elevating if bizarre, tempered by a sentiment suggesting the presence of melancholy beneath the motley; the latter a tragedy, wild and extravagant as the passions of a Lear, yet redeemed from absolute despair by the thread of hope chased through the scheme. Comedy was in the air that evening, a riotous happiness which inebriated like wine. Singing noisily, although unconscious of it, Dr. Berry gambolled towards the house, under the rose bowers, along the track which his own feet had worn into the semblance of a path, beside the acacias with their grape-like bunches of bloom bursting into pink or white. He passed below the sun-dial, which rose altar-like above a mass of tottering masonry coloured with flowers, through the herb garden, and on until the jasmine and the honeysuckle wafted their fragrance at him from the worm-eaten porch. A blackbird flew past screaming. He looked up, annoyed at the interruption, and straightway shivered, because he saw the figure of a man standing among the high grass near the front of the house. Indignation possessed the dreamer’s mind when he beheld a material presence in his garden. His life had become so intimately connected with that of the Strath that he was unable to think of the garden as another man’s property. So, he reflected, the iron gates had been forced apart at last, and a master was visiting the bewildered place after the silence of a hundred years—for the thinker was convinced that the elderly man, standing in the ripening grass, was the owner—and now the garden was to be his no longer, and his dreams were to be brought to an end. The stranger lifted his hat and bowed grotesquely. The rector returned this compliment, after a more dignified manner, and they approached, making old-fashioned salutes at every step.

“The learned and distinguished Doctor Berry?” said the stranger, holding out his hand, and laughing with what beyond the wall might have appeared to be unreasonable mirth.

The scholar laughed also as he replied, shaking the hand offered him in conscious tune to the persistent music in his brain.

“My lawyer has told me about you. I am Henry Reed, the owner and master of the Strath. It pleases me that you should have used my garden. I trust that the inspiration of the place has benefited you.”

It was the first occasion on which Dr. Berry had spoken to a fellow-being in the garden. He could not rid himself of the fantastic idea that he and the man before him were characters of a comedy playing the parts which had been assigned to them.

“I assure you I have found this place a veritable wonder-world,” he replied. “It has made another man of me—”

“The Strath has made you a dreamer,” broke in the owner sharply. “Men who dream perform nothing. What an overpowering atmosphere is here!” he went on, removing his hat and laughing again. “I can scarcely breathe. Only a few minutes ago I entered upon this property of mine, a tired and solemn man, and now I am as merry as a clown. Do the bees always buzz so musically? Are the flowers always sending forth this fragrance? Ah, you laugh at me.”

“I laughed in spite of myself,” the rector answered. “No, the music is not always soft, as it is this evening. When the wind changes, and the sky becomes dark, and the clouds fall low, you shall perceive a difference.”

“The place is haunted,” the owner shouted.

“Not so,” said the rector happily. “There is nothing here which could terrify a child. Like us the Strath has its moods. Sometimes it is happy, and often it is sorrowful. It must either laugh or groan. And now you will change it all,” he went on bitterly. “You will restore the house, dig up the garden, prune the orchard, mow the lawns, gravel the paths, and lay the Strath out like a dead body.”

Again the owner laughed. “Let me set your mind at ease,” he cried, turning himself as though he would address the house. “Even if I desired to destroy this picture I could not, for I am a poor man, and the expense of restoration is beyond my means. I have come to live here, but I beg you to use my garden as you have done in the past. And now shall we enter the house?”

Very gladly the rector accepted the invitation. He had often pushed aside the creepers, to stare at the windows, heavily obscured with dirt and blinded by close-fastened shutters, longing to visit the rooms which were in darkness beyond. He passed with the owner of the Strath towards the bridge which spanned the black water; and as they walked they went on laughing.

“Will the bridge bear us?” questioned the master, testing the damp green wood with a nervous foot.

“Let me cross first to convince you,” said the scholar.

Reed’s mood changed when they stood beside the door; and it was with signs of fear he produced a key, a feather, and a small bottle of oil. “The light is fading rapidly,” he muttered as he lubricated the lock. “And I have brought no lamp.”

“There may be candles inside the house,” the rector murmured, although he had no good reason for saying so.

The bolt crawled back with a scream, and wood dust rained upon their heads as the door creaked open. They passed side by side into the dampness of the hall, while the master muttered, “This house has not been entered for a hundred years.”

“So it is furnished, as I have seen it in my dreams,” the rector murmured.

Their feet sank into the dust, which in places had drifted to a depth of several inches. Stairs, carpets, and pictures were coated and muffled; a mildewed growth shewed in patches on the walls; a stunted nightshade struggled around a quaint eight-legged table, its roots sucking nutriment from the damp rottenness of the wood. A circle of fungi occupied the centre of the hall, and some bats flickered up and down the stairway.

“My inheritance,” said Reed, shivering as he ploughed his fingers through the silky dust.

“The garden is your inheritance,” replied his companion. “That is the soul of the Strath. This is the dry body.”

Walking as he spoke to a door, before which a moth-eaten curtain hung in shreds, he sought for the handle and pushed inward. The door gave unwillingly, pressing the dust into a high ridge, and the rector groped forward holding a lighted match above his head. Their eyes encountered no repulsive sight; and yet they hesitated before making an entry, because the past was brought before them, and it is the custom of men to waver when they open a tomb.

They looked into a dining-room and saw a long table, decked out with plate and glass, with what had been flowers and fruit, and decanters caked with wine; around the table chairs were grouped, or pushed aside, as their former occupants had left them. They beheld the concluding course of a dinner one hundred years old, as the long dead diners had left it, interrupted and startled by the arrival of ill news.

“I will go in and open the shutters,” said the rector firmly.

“You hear nothing?” muttered the owner. “Nothing?”

“There is nothing to hear, except the chirping of the birds.”

“I thought I heard footsteps, and a woman’s voice.”

“No,” said the scholar. “There will be no tragedy while this weather lasts.” He went on hurriedly, feeling Reed’s eyes upon him, “Your imagination is playing with you. You think you hear voices of the men and women who have dined. They are not here. Their bodies are as the dust which lies upon their table and their chairs.”

Lighting another match he passed in, and leaning over the table dug out the wicks of the candles and lighted one after another, until he had converted each of the seven-branched candlesticks into a row of stars. Then he turned and beheld Reed at his side, staring up and down, sweeping the cloth with his great beard.

“You are my guest,” he laughed with a hollow note. “In the face of your knowledge of this place I had almost forgotten that I am master here. Will you sit down at my table and taste my old wine?”

“Let us have air,” said the rector.

Unfastening the shutters he drew them back, and immediately a tawny glow mingled with the candle-light. The windows were encrusted with dirt, and black ivy stems were matted against the glass. The iron window catch was rotten and snapped when the rector tried to force it back. He strained at the casement, but the hinge remained immovable.

Reed stood beside the table, fingering one article after another. That heap of dust had been once a flower, that was an orange shrivelled to the size of a walnut; here was a snuff-box standing open, there a half-smoked pipe leaning against a box which still contained bon-bons. Near him a glass had been overturned in the days when it was the custom of men to drink hard, and when he cleared away the dust with the flat of his hand he could distinguish the stain of wine upon the yellow cloth. He picked up a lady’s glove, black and full of holes, and bringing it to his face detected the faint fragrance of her who had dropped it. Another pile of dust resolved itself into a powder puff, and yet another became a scrap of paper. These had presumably been dropped together. Reed unfolded the paper, shook it, and holding it near the candles read as much as he could decipher aloud:—

“I will wait near the sun-dial until you come. Do not wear a mask. Dear, do not tempt fate by even thinking of a mask here.… to father, if there be a storm this night… Thomas flogging a horse, and I felt no pity… This atmosphere is… to rejoin my ship… Nelson against the French. I shall not be at dinner.… later on.”

“What does it mean?” cried the rector, as he stumbled towards the table.

“I cannot trace the signature,” muttered Reed. “It means, doctor,” he went on, “that the Strath is controlled by some unholy influence which has kept it empty all these years.”

“No,” cried Dr. Berry fervently. “That is not true. Consider how safe, and happy we are. Neither you nor I suffer the slightest sense of fear. Hardly a day has passed and not found me in the garden during these past thirty years, and I am a wiser man than when I came. It is true I have felt at times the influence which that dead hand suggests. But it has done me no harm.”

“It has aged and saddened you,” said Reed curtly. “It has caused you to forget how a man should live.”

“The Strath has been my happiness, my pleasure, as well as my inspiration,” said the scholar, clutching the back of a chair, and scarcely noticing when it broke away in his hands. “You will admit as much when you read my translations and restorations of Sappho. No unholy influence could have prompted me to that work. Knowledge has come to me while walking through the garden, amid the fragrance of the flowers, the song of the insects, the music in the air—”

The master of the Strath interrupted with a shout of discovery. Following the guidance of his hand the rector saw a dark face grinning at them from the opposite wall, over the glow of candles and the tawny light from the half sealed window, through the grime that a hundred years had placed upon it.

Dr. Berry hurried forward, mounted a chair, and removed from the wall what proved to be merely a grotesque ornament, a brown mask, with the leering mouth, great nose, grinning eye-sockets, and arched brows of comedy. The mask was made of wood, stained a deep brown, and inside cut upon the surface appeared the words, “Copied at Nuremberg by Jos. Falk.”

An impulse, which could not be controlled, seized both men, and they laughed until the old house rang.