The Trees of Pride Read online

much better way, which had been tried inseveral cases where bogus miracles had been shown up. The thing to dowas to get the thing really believed everywhere as a miracle, and thenshown up everywhere as a sham miracle. I can't put all the arguments aswell as he did, but that was the notion, I think."

  The doctor nodded, gazing silently at the sand; and the Squire resumedwith undiminished relish.

  "We agreed that I should drop through the hole into the cave, and makemy way through the tunnels, where I often used to play as a boy, tothe railway station a few miles from here, and there take a trainfor London. It was necessary for the joke, of course, that I shoulddisappear without being traced; so I made my way to a port, and put ina very pleasant month or two round my old haunts in Cyprus and theMediterranean. There's no more to say of that part of the business,except that I arranged to be back by a particular time; and here I am.But I've heard enough of what's gone on round here to be satisfied thatI've done the trick. Everybody in Cornwall and most people in SouthEngland have heard of the Vanishing Squire; and thousands of noodleshave been nodding their heads over crystals and tarot cards at thismarvelous proof of an unseen world. I reckon the Reappearing Squire willscatter their cards and smash their crystals, so that such rubbish won'tappear again in the twentieth century. I'll make the peacock trees thelaughing stock of all Europe and America."

  "Well," said the lawyer, who was the first to rearrange his wits, "I'msure we're all only too delighted to see you again, Squire; and I quiteunderstand your explanation and your own very natural motives in thematter. But I'm afraid I haven't got the hang of everything yet. Grantedthat you wanted to vanish, was it necessary to put bogus bones in thecave, so as nearly to put a halter round the neck of Doctor Brown? Andwho put it there? The statement would appear perfectly maniacal; but sofar as I can make head or tail out of anything, Doctor Brown seems tohave put it there himself."

  The doctor lifted his head for the first time.

  "Yes; I put the bones there," he said. "I believe I am the first son ofAdam who ever manufactured all the evidence of a murder charge againsthimself."

  It was the Squire's turn to look astonished. The old gentleman lookedrather wildly from one to the other.

  "Bones! Murder charge!" he ejaculated. "What the devil is all this?Whose bones?"

  "Your bones, in a manner of speaking," delicately conceded the doctor."I had to make sure you had really died, and not disappeared by magic."

  The Squire in his turn seemed more hopelessly puzzled than the wholecrowd of his friends had been over his own escapade. "Why not?" hedemanded. "I thought it was the whole point to make it look like magic.Why did you want me to die so much?"

  Doctor Brown had lifted his head; and he now very slowly lifted hishand. He pointed with outstretched arm at the headland overhanging theforeshore, just above the entrance to the cave. It was the exact part ofthe beach where Paynter had first landed, on that spring morning whenhe had looked up in his first fresh wonder at the peacock trees. But thetrees were gone.

  The fact itself was no surprise to them; the clearance had naturallybeen one of the first of the sweeping changes of the Treherne regime.But though they knew it well, they had wholly forgotten it; and itssignificance returned on them suddenly like a sign in heaven.

  "That is the reason," said the doctor. "I have worked for that forfourteen years."

  They no longer looked at the bare promontory on which the feathery treeshad once been so familiar a sight; for they had something else to lookat. Anyone seeing the Squire now would have shifted his opinion aboutwhere to find the lunatic in that crowd. It was plain in a flash thatthe change had fallen on him like a thunderbolt; that he, at least, hadnever had the wildest notion that the tale of the Vanishing Squire hadbeen but a prelude to that of the vanishing trees. The next half hourwas full of his ravings and expostulations, which gradually died awayinto demands for explanation and incoherent questions repeated againand again. He had practically to be overruled at last, in spite of therespect in which he was held, before anything like a space and silencewere made in which the doctor could tell his own story. It was perhaps asingular story, of which he alone had ever had the knowledge; and thoughits narration was not uninterrupted, it may be set forth consecutivelyin his own words.

  "First, I wish it clearly understood that I believe in nothing. I donot even give the nothing I believe a name; or I should be an atheist.I have never had inside my head so much as a hint of heaven and hell. Ithink it most likely we are worms in the mud; but I happen to be sorryfor the other worms under the wheel. And I happen myself to be a sortof worm that turns when he can. If I care nothing for piety, I care lessfor poetry. I'm not like Ashe here, who is crammed with criminology, buthas all sorts of other culture as well. I know nothing about culture,except bacteria culture. I sometimes fancy Mr. Ashe is as much an artcritic as Mr. Paynter; only he looks for his heroes, or villains, inreal life. But I am a very practical man; and my stepping stones havebeen simply scientific facts. In this village I found a fact--a fever.I could not classify it; it seemed peculiar to this corner of the coast;it had singular reactions of delirium and mental breakdown. I studied itexactly as I should a queer case in the hospital, and corresponded andcompared notes with other men of science. But nobody had even a workinghypothesis about it, except of course the ignorant peasantry, who saidthe peacock trees were in some wild way poisonous.

  "Well, the peacock trees were poisonous. The peacock trees did producethe fever. I verified the fact in the plain plodding way required,comparing all the degrees and details of a vast number of cases;and there were a shocking number to compare. At the end of it I haddiscovered the thing as Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood.Everybody was the worse for being near the things; those who cameoff best were exactly the exceptions that proved the rule, abnormallyhealthy and energetic people like the Squire and his daughter. In otherwords, the peasants were right. But if I put it that way, somebody willcry: 'But do you believe it was supernatural then?' In fact, that's whatyou'll all say; and that's exactly what I complain of. I fancy hundredsof men have been left dead and diseases left undiscovered, by thissuspicion of superstition, this stupid fear of fear. Unless you seedaylight through the forest of facts from the first, you won't ventureinto the wood at all. Unless we can promise you beforehand that thereshall be what you call a natural explanation, to save your preciousdignity from miracles, you won't even hear the beginning of the plaintale. Suppose there isn't a natural explanation! Suppose there is, andwe never find it! Suppose I haven't a notion whether there is or not!What the devil has that to do with you, or with me in dealing withthe facts I do know? My own instinct is to think there is; that if myresearches could be followed far enough it would be found that somehorrible parody of hay fever, some effect analogous to that of pollen,would explain all the facts. I have never found the explanation. WhatI have found are the facts. And the fact is that those trees on thetop there dealt death right and left, as certainly as if they had beengiants, standing on a hill and knocking men down in crowds with a club.It will be said that now I had only to produce my proofs and have thenuisance removed. Perhaps I might have convinced the scientific worldfinally, when more and more processions of dead men had passedthrough the village to the cemetery. But I had not got to convince thescientific world, but the Lord of the Manor. The Squire will pardon mysaying that it was a very different thing. I tried it once; I lostmy temper, and said things I do not defend; and I left the Squire'sprejudices rooted anew, like the trees. I was confronted with onecolossal coincidence that was an obstacle to all my aims. One thing madeall my science sound like nonsense. It was the popular legend.

  "Squire, if there were a legend of hay fever, you would not believe inhay fever. If there were a popular story about pollen, you would saythat pollen was only a popular story. I had something against me heavierand more hopeless than the hostility of the learned; I had the supportof the ignorant. My truth was hopelessly tangled up with a tale thatthe educated were resolved to regard a
s entirely a lie. I never tried toexplain again; on the contrary, I apologized, affected a conversion tothe common-sense view, and watched events. And all the time the lines ofa larger, if more crooked plan, began to get clearer in my mind. I knewthat Miss Vane, whether or no she were married to Mr. Treherne, as Iafterward found she was, was so much under his influence that the firstday of her inheritance would be the last day of the poisonous trees.But she could not inherit, or even interfere, till the Squire died. Itbecame simply self-evident, to a rational mind, that the Squire mustdie. But wishing to be humane as well as rational, I desired his deathto be temporary.

  "Doubtless my scheme was completed by a chapter of accidents, but I waswatching for such accidents. Thus I had a foreshadowing of how