The Trees of Pride Read online

honorableseriousness.

  "A capital fellow," agreed the Squire. "Where is Miles? You will have acigar, Mr. Treherne?" And he got up from the table; the rest followed,and the group broke up on the lawn.

  "Remarkable man, Treherne," said the American to the lawyerconversationally.

  "Remarkable is the word," assented Ashe rather grimly. "But I don'tthink I'll make any remark about him."

  The Squire, too impatient to wait for the yellow-faced Miles, hadbetaken himself indoors for the cigars, and Barbara found herself oncemore paired off with the poet, as she floated along the terrace garden;but this time, symbolically enough, upon the same level of lawn. Mr.Treherne looked less eccentric after having shed his curious cloak, andseemed a quieter and more casual figure.

  "I didn't mean to be rude to you just now," she said abruptly.

  "And that's the worst of it," replied the man of letters, "for I'mhorribly afraid I did mean to be rude to you. When I looked up and sawyou up there something surged up in me that was in all the revolutionsof history. Oh, there was admiration in it too! Perhaps there wasidolatry in all the iconoclasts."

  He seemed to have a power of reaching rather intimate conversation inone silent and cat-like bound, as he had scaled the steep road, and itmade her feel him to be dangerous, and perhaps unscrupulous. She changedthe subject sharply, not without it movement toward gratifying her owncuriosity.

  "What DID you mean by all that about walking trees?" she asked. "Don'ttell me you really believe in a magic tree that eats birds!"

  "I should probably surprise you," said Treherne gravely, "more by what Idon't believe than by what I do."

  Then, after a pause, he made a general gesture toward the house andgarden. "I'm afraid I don't believe in all this; for instance, inElizabethan houses and Elizabethan families and the way estates havebeen improved, and the rest of it. Look at our friend the woodcutternow." And he pointed to the man with the quaint black beard, who wasstill plying his ax upon the timber below.

  "That man's family goes back for ages, and it was far richer and freerin what you call the Dark Ages than it is now. Wait till the Cornishpeasant writes a history of Cornwall."

  "But what in the world," she demanded, "has this to do with whether youbelieve in a tree eating birds?"

  "Why should I confess what I believe in?" he said, a muffled drum ofmutiny in his voice. "The gentry came here and took our land and tookour labor and took our customs. And now, after exploitation, a vilerthing, education! They must take our dreams!"

  "Well, this dream was rather a nightmare, wasn't it?" asked Barbara,smiling; and the next moment grew quite grave, saying almost anxiously:"But here's Doctor Brown back again. Why, he looks quite upset."

  The doctor, a black figure on the green lawn, was, indeed, coming towardthem at a very vigorous walk. His body and gait very much younger thanhis face, which seemed prematurely lined as with worry; his brow wasbald, and projected from the straight, dark hair behind it. He wasvisibly paler than when he left the lunch table.

  "I am sorry to say, Miss Vane," he said, "that I am the bearer of badnews to poor Martin, the woodman here. His daughter died half an hourago."

  "Oh," cried Barbara warmly, "I am SO sorry!"

  "So am I," said the doctor, and passed on rather abruptly; he ran downthe stone steps between the stone urns; and they saw him in talk withthe woodcutter. They could not see the woodcutter's face. He stood withhis back to them, but they saw something that seemed more moving thanany change of countenance. The man's hand holding the ax rose high abovehis head, and for a flash it seemed as if he would have cut down thedoctor. But in fact he was not looking at the doctor. His face was settoward the cliff, where, sheer out of the dwarf forest, rose, giganticand gilded by the sun, the trees of pride.

  The strong brown hand made a movement and was empty. The ax wentcircling swiftly through the air, its head showing like a silvercrescent against the gray twilight of the trees. It did not reach itstall objective, but fell among the undergrowth, shaking up a flyinglitter of birds. But in the poet's memory, full of primal things,something seemed to say that he had seen the birds of some pagan augury,the ax of some pagan sacrifice.

  A moment after the man made a heavy movement forward, as if to recoverhis tool; but the doctor put a hand on his arm.

  "Never mind that now," they heard him say sadly and kindly. "The Squirewill excuse you any more work, I know."

  Something made the girl look at Treherne. He stood gazing, his head alittle bent, and one of his black elf-locks had fallen forward over hisforehead. And again she had the sense of a shadow over the grass; shealmost felt as if the grass were a host of fairies, and that the fairieswere not her friends.