The Trees of Pride Read online

only have fallenoff. What else can he be but dead?"

  "I speak as a lawyer," returned Ashe, raising his eyebrows. "We can'tpresume his death, or have an inquest or anything till we find the poorfellow's body, or some remains that may reasonably be presumed to be hisbody."

  "I see," observed Paynter quietly. "You speak as a lawyer; but I don'tthink it's very hard to guess what you think as a man."

  "I own I'd rather be a man than a lawyer," said the doctor, ratherroughly. "I'd no notion the law was such an ass. What's the good ofkeeping the poor girl out of her property, and the estate all goingto pieces? Well, I must be off, or my patients will be going to piecestoo."

  And with a curt salutation he pursued his path down to the village.

  "That man does his duty, if anybody does," remarked Paynter. "We mustpardon his--shall I say manners or manner?"

  "Oh, I bear him no malice," replied Ashe good-humoredly, "But I'm gladhe's gone, because--well, because I don't want him to know how jollyright he is." And he leaned back in his chair and stared up at the roofof green leaves.

  "You are sure," said Paynter, looking at the table, "that Squire Vane isdead?"

  "More than that," said Ashe, still staring at the leaves. "I'm sure ofhow he died."

  "Ah!" said the American, with an intake of breath, and they remained fora moment, one gazing at the tree and the other at the table.

  "Sure is perhaps too strong a word," continued Ashe. "But my convictionwill want some shaking. I don't envy the counsel for the defense."

  "The counsel for the defense," repeated Paynter, and looked up quicklyat his companion. He was struck again by the man's Napoleonic chin andjaw, as he had been when they first talked of the legend of St. Securis.

  "Then," he began, "you don't think the trees--"

  "The trees be damned!" snorted the lawyer. "The tree had two legs onthat evening. What our friend the poet," he added, with a sneer,"would call a walking tree. Apropos of our friend the poet, you seemedsurprised that night to find he was not walking poetically by the seaall the time, and I fear I affected to share your ignorance. I was notso sure then as I am now."

  "Sure of what?" demanded the other.

  "To begin with," said Ashe, "I'm sure our friend the poet followed Vaneinto the wood that night, for I saw him coming out again."

  Paynter leaned forward, suddenly pale with excitement, and struck thewooden table so that it rattled.

  "Mr. Ashe, you're wrong," he cried. "You're a wonderful man and you'rewrong. You've probably got tons of true convincing evidence, and you'rewrong. I know this poet; I know him as a poet; and that's just what youdon't. I know you think he gave you crooked answers, and seemed to beall smiles and black looks at once; but you don't understand the type.I know now why you don't understand the Irish. Sometimes you thinkit's soft, and sometimes sly, and sometimes murderous, and sometimesuncivilized; and all the time it's only civilized; quivering with thesensitive irony of understanding all that you don't understand."

  "Well," said Ashe shortly, "we'll see who's right."

  "We will," cried Cyprian, and rose suddenly from the table. All thedrooping of the aesthete had dropped from him; his Yankee accent rosehigh, like a horn of defiance, and there was nothing about him but theNew World.

  "I guess I will look into this myself," he said, stretching his longlimbs like an athlete. "I search that little wood of yours to-morrow.It's a bit late, or I'd do it now."

  "The wood has been searched," said the lawyer, rising also.

  "Yes," drawled the American. "It's been searched by servants, policemen,local policeman, and quite a lot of people; and do you know I have anotion that nobody round here is likely to have searched it at all."

  "And what are you going to do with it?" asked Ashe.

  "What I bet they haven't done," replied Cyprian. "I'm going to climb atree."

  And with a quaint air of renewed cheerfulness he took himself away at arapid walk to his inn.

  He appeared at daybreak next morning outside the Vane Arms with all theair of one setting out on his travels in distant lands. He had a fieldglass slung over his shoulder, and a very large sheath knife buckled bya belt round his waist, and carried with the cool bravado of the bowieknife of a cowboy. But in spite of this backwoodsman's simplicity, orperhaps rather because of it, he eyed with rising relish the picturesqueplan and sky line of the antiquated village, and especially the woodensquare of the old inn sign that hung over his head; a shield, of whichthe charges seemed to him a mere medley of blue dolphins, gold crosses,and scarlet birds. The colors and cubic corners of that paintedboard pleased him like a play or a puppet show. He stood staring andstraddling for some moments on the cobbles of the little market place;then he gave a short laugh and began to mount the steep streets towardthe high park and garden beyond. From the high lawn, above the tree andtable, he could see on one side the land stretch away past the houseinto a great rolling plain, which under the clear edges of the dawnseemed dotted with picturesque details. The woods here and there onthe plain looked like green hedgehogs, as grotesque as the incongruousbeasts found unaccountably walking in the blank spaces of mediaevalmaps. The land, cut up into colored fields, recalled the heraldry of thesignboard; this also was at once ancient and gay. On the other side theground to seaward swept down and then up again to the famous or infamouswood; the square of strange trees lay silently tilted on the slope, alsosuggesting, if not a map, or least a bird's-eye view. Only the triplecenterpiece of the peacock trees rose clear of the sky line; and thesestood up in tranquil sunlight as things almost classical, a triangulartemple of the winds. They seemed pagan in a newer and more placidsense; and he felt a newer and more boyish curiosity and courage for theconsulting of the oracle. In all his wanderings he had never walked solightly, for the connoisseur of sensations had found something to do atlast; he was fighting for a friend.

  He was brought to a standstill once, however, and that at the verygateway of the garden of the trees of knowledge. Just outside the blackentry of the wood, now curtained with greener and larger leafage, hecame on a solitary figure.

  It was Martin, the woodcutter, wading in the bracken and looking abouthim in rather a lost fashion. The man seemed to be talking to himself.

  "I dropped it here," he was saying. "But I'll never work with it again Ireckon. Doctor wouldn't let me pick it up, when I wanted to pick it up;and now they've got it, like they've got the Squire. Wood and iron, woodand iron, but eating it's nothing to them."

  "Come!" said Paynter kindly, remembering the man's domestic trouble."Miss Vane will see you have anything you want, I know. And lookhere, don't brood on all those stories about the Squire. Is there theslightest trace of the trees having anything to do with it? Is thereeven this extra branch the idiots talked about?"

  There had been growing on Paynter the suspicion that the man before himwas not perfectly sane; yet he was much more startled by the sudden andcold sanity that looked for an instant out of the woodman's eyes, as heanswered in his ordinary manner.

  "Well, sir, did you count the branches before?"

  Then he seemed to relapse; and Paynter left him wandering and waveringin the undergrowth; and entered the wood like one across whose sunnypath a shadow has fallen for an instant.

  Diving under the wood, he was soon threading a leafy path which, evenunder that summer sun, shone only with an emerald twilight, as if itwere on the floor of the sea. It wound about more shakily than he hadsupposed, as if resolved to approach the central trees as if they werethe heart of the maze at Hampton Court. They were the heart of the mazefor him, anyhow; he sought them as straight as a crooked road wouldcarry him; and, turning a final corner, he beheld, for the first time,the foundations of those towers of vegetation he had as yet only seenfrom above, as they stood waist-high in the woodland. He found thesuspicion correct which supposed the tree branched from one greatroot, like a candelabrum; the fork, though stained and slimy with greenfungoids, was quite near the ground, and offered a first foothold. Heput his foot in it
, and without a flash of hesitation went aloft, likeJack climbing the Bean stalk.

  Above him the green roof of leaves and boughs seemed sealed like afirmament of foliage; but, by bending and breaking the branches toright and left he slowly forced a passage upward; and had at last, andsuddenly, the sensation coming out on the top of the world. He feltas if he had never been in the open air before. Sea and land lay in acircle below and about him, as he sat astride a branch of the tall tree;he was almost surprised to see the