Bye-Ways Part 9

Very long afterwards, however,--although this fact was never known to Renfrew,--two Russian travellers in the Great Sahara desert witnessed one evening, as they sat in their tent door, the performance of a savage charmer of snakes who carried upon his body three serpents,--one striped, one black, one white. And the younger of them noticed, and remarked to the other, that the charmer wore half-way up the little finger of his left hand a thin gold circle in which there was set a magnificent black pearl.

A TRIBUTE OF SOULS

PRELUDE

The matter of Carlounie, the village of Perthshire in Scotland, is become notorious in the world. The name of its late owner, his remarkable transformation, his fortunate career, his married life, the brooding darkness that fell latterly upon his mind, the flaming deed that he consummated, its appalling outcome, and the finding of him by Mr Mackenzie, the minister of the parish of Carlounie, sunk in a pool of the burn that runs through a "den" close to his house--all these things are fresh in the minds of many men. It has been supposed that he had discovered a common intrigue between his wife, Kate, formerly an hospital nurse, and his tenant, Hugh Fraser of Piccadilly, London. It has been universally thought that this discovery led to the last action of his life. The following pages, found among his papers, seem to put a very different complexion on the affair, although they suggest a mediaeval legend rather than a history of modern days. It may be added that careful enquiries have been made among the inhabitants of Carlounie, and that no man, woman, or child has been discovered who ever saw, or heard of, the grey traveller mentioned in Alistair Ralston's narrative.

I

THE STRANGER BY THE BURN

Can a fever change a man's whole nature, giving him powers that he never had before? Can he go into it impotent, starved, naked, emerge from it potent, satisfied, clothed with possibilities that are wonders, that are miracles to him? It must be so; it is so. And yet--I must go back to that sad autumn day when I walked beside the burn. Can I write down my moods, my feelings of that day and of the following days? And if I can, does that power of pinning the b.u.t.terfly of my soul down upon the board--does that power, too, bud, blossom from a soil mysteriously fertilised by illness? Formerly, I could as easily have flown in the air to the summit of cloud-capped Schiehallion as have set on paper even the smallest fragment of my mind. Now--well, let me see, let me still further know my new, my marvellous self.

Yes, that first day! It was Autumn, but only early Autumn. The leaves were changing colour upon the birch trees, upon the rowans. At dawn, mists stood round to shield the toilet of the rising sun. At evening, they thronged together like a pale troop of shadowy mutes to a.s.sist at his departure to the under world. It was a misty season, through which the bracken upon the hillsides of my Carlounie glowed furtively in tints of brown and of orange; and my mind, my whole being, seemed to move in mists. I was just twenty-two, an orphan, master of my estate of Carlounie, a Scotch laird, and my own governor. And some idiots envied me then, as many begin to envy me now. I even remember one ghastly old man who clapped me on the shoulder, and, with the addition of an unnecessary oath, swore that I was "a lucky youngster." I, with my thin, chetif body, my burning, weakly, starved, and yet ambitious soul--lucky!

I remember that I broke into a harsh laugh, and longed to kill the babbling beast.

And it was the next day, in the afternoon, that I took that book--my Bible--and went forth alone to the long den in which the burn hides and cries its presence. Yes, I took Goethe's "Faust," and my own complaining spirit, and went out into the mist with my misty, clouded mind. My cousin Gavin wanted me to go out shooting. He laughed and rallied me upon my ill-luck on the previous day, when I had gone out and been the joke of my own keepers because I had missed every bird; and I turned and railed at him, and told him to leave me to myself. And, as I went, I heard him muttering, "That wretched little fellow! To think that he should be owner of Carlounie!" Now, he sings another tune.

With "Faust" in my hand, and hatred in my heart, I went out into the delicately chilly air, down the winding ways of the garden, through the creaking iron gateway. I emerged on to the wilder land, irregular, gra.s.s-covered ground, strewn with grey granite boulders, among which coa.r.s.e, wiry ferns grew st.u.r.dily. The blackfaced sheep whisked their broad tails at me as I pa.s.sed, then stooped their ever-greedy mouths to their damp and eternal meal again. I heard the thin and distant cry of a hawk, poised somewhere up in the mist. The hills, clothed in the death-like glory of the bracken, loomed around me, like some phantom, tricked-out procession pa.s.sing through desolate places. And then I heard the voice of the burn--that voice which is even now for ever in my ears.

To me that day it was the voice of one alive; and it is the voice of one alive to me now. I descended the sloping hill with my lounging, weak-kneed gait, at which the creatures who called me master had so often looked contemptuously askance. (I was often tired at that time.) I descended, I say, until I reached the edge of the tree-fringed den, and the burn was noisy in my ears. I could see it now, leaping here and there out of its hiding-place--ivory foam among the dripping larches, and the birches with their silver stems; ivory foam among the deep brown and flaming orange of the bracken, and in that foam a voice calling--calling me to come down into its hiding-place, presided over by the mists--to come down into its hiding-place, away from men: away from the living creatures whom I hated because I envied them, because they were stronger than I, because they could do what I could not do, say what I could not say. Gavin, Dr Wedderburn, my tenants, the smallest farm boy, the grooms, the little leaping peasants--I hated, I hated them all. And then I obeyed the voice of the ivory foam, and I went down into the hiding-place of the burn.

It ran through strange and secret places where the soft mists hung in wet wreaths. I seemed to be in another world when I was in its lair. On the sharply rising banks stood the sentinel trees like shadows, some of them with tortured and tormented shapes. As I turned and looked straight up the hill of the burn's descending course, the mountain from which it came closed in the prospect inexorably. A soft gloom hemmed us in--me and the burn which talked to me. We two were out of the world which I hated and longed to have at my feet. Yes, we were in another world, full of murmuring and of restful unrest; and now that I was right down at the water-side, the ivory face of my friend, the ivory lips that spoke to me, the ivory heart that beat against my heart--so sick and so weary--were varied and were changed. As thoughts streak a mind, the clear amber of the pools among the rocks streaked the continuous foam that marked the incessant leaps taken by the water towards the valley.

The silence of those pools was brilliant, like the pauses for contemplation in a great career of action; and their silence spoke to me, mingling mysteriously with the voice of the foam. The course of the burn is broken up, and attended by rocks that have been modelled by the action of the running water into a hundred shapes. Some are dressed in mosses, yellow and green, like velvet to the touch, and all covered with drops of moisture; some are gaunt and naked and deplorable, with sharp edges and dry faces. The burn avoids some with a cunning and almost coquettish grace, dashes brutally against others, as if impelled by an internal violence of emotion. Others, again, it caresses quite gently, and would be glad to linger by, if Nature would allow the dalliance. And this army of rocks helps to give to the burn its charm of infinite variety, and to fill its voice with a whole gamut of expression; for the differing shape of each boulder, against which it rushes in its long career, gives it a different note. It flickers across the small and round stone with the purling cry of a child. From the stone curved inwards, and with a hollow bosom it gains a crooning, liquid melody. The pointed and narrow colony of rocks which break it into an intricate network of small water threads, toss it, chattering frivolously, towards the dark pool under the birches, where the trout play like sinister shadows and the insects dance in the sombre pomp of Autumn; and when it gains a great slab that serves it for a spring-board, from which it takes a mighty leap, its voice is loud and defiant, and shrieks with a banshee of triumph--in which, too, there is surely an undercurrent of wailing woe. Oh, the burn has many voices among the rocks, under the ferns and the birch trees, in the brooding darkness of the mists and shadows, between the steep walls of the green banks that hem it in! Many voices which can sing, when they choose, one song, again and again and--monotonously--again!

So--now on this sad Autumn day--I was with the burn in its hiding-place, cool, damp, fretful. Carlounie sank from my sight. My garden, the wilder land beyond, the moors on which yesterday my incompetence as a shot had roused the contempt of my cousin and of my hirelings--all were lost to view. I was away from all men in this narrow, tree-shrouded cleft of a world. I sat down on a rock, and, stretching out my legs, rested my heels on another rock. Beneath my legs the clear brown water glided swiftly. I sat and listened to its murmur. And, just then, it did not occur to me that water can utter words like men. The murmur was suggestive but definitely inarticulate. I had come down here to be away and to think. The murmur of my mind spoke to the murmur of the burn; and, as ever, in those days, it lamented and cursed and bitterly complained.

Why, why was I pursued by a malady of incompetence that clung to both mind and body? (So ran my thoughts.) Why was I bruised and beaten by Providence? Why had I been given a soul that could not express itself in the frame of a coward, a weakling, a thin, nervous, dwarfish, almost a deformed, creature? If my soul had corresponded exactly to my body, then all might have been well enough. I should have been more complete, although less, in some way, than I now was. For such a soul would have accepted cowardice, weakness, inferiority to others as suitable to it, as a right fate. Such a soul would never have known the meaning of the word rebellion, would never have been able to understand its own cancer of disease, to diagnose the symptoms of its villainous and creeping malady. It would never have aspired like a flame, and longed in vain to burn clearly and grandly or to flicker out for ever. Rather would such a soul have guttered on like some cheap and ill-smelling candle, shedding shadows rather than any light, ignorant of its own obscurity, regardless of the possibilities that teem like waking children in the wondrous womb of life, oblivious of the contempt of the souls around it, heedless of ambition, of the trumpet call of success, of the l.u.s.t to be something, to do something, of the magic, of the stinging magic of achievement.

With such a soul in my hateful, pinched, meagre, pallid body--I thought, sitting thus by the burn--I might have been content, an utterly low, and perhaps an utterly satisfied product of the fiend creation.

But my soul was not of this kind, and so I was the most bitterly miserable of men. G.o.d--or the Devil--had made me ill-shaped, physically despicable, with the malign sort of countenance that so often accompanies and ill.u.s.trates a bad poor body. My limbs, without being actually twisted, were shrunken and incompetent--they would not obey my desires as do the limbs of other men. My legs would not grip a horse.

When I rode I was a laughing-stock. My arms had no swiftness, no agility, no delicate and subtle certainty. When I tried to box, to fence, I was one whirling, jigging incapacity. I had feeble sight, and objects presented themselves to my vision so strangely that I could not shoot straight. I, Alistair Ralston the young Laird of Carlounie! When I walked my limbs moved heavily and awkwardly. I had no grace, no lightness, no ordinary, quite usual competence of bodily power. And this was bitter, yet as nothing to the Marah that lay beyond. For my body was in a way complete. It was a wretch. But when you came to the mind you had the real tragedy. In many decrepit flesh temples there dwells a commanding spirit, as a great G.o.d might dwell--of mysterious choice--in a ruinous and decaying lodge in a wilderness. And such a spirit rules, disposes, presides, develops, has its own full and superb existence, triumphing not merely over, but actually through the contemptible body in which it resides, so that men even are led to worship the very ugliness and poverty of this body, to adore it for its power to retain such a mighty spirit within it. Such a spirit was not mine. Had it been, I might have been happy by the burn that Autumn day. Had it been, I might never--But I am antic.i.p.ating, and I must not antic.i.p.ate. I must sit with the brown water rushing beneath the arch of my limbs, and recall the horror of my musing.

In a manner, then, my soul matched my body. It was feeble and incompetent too. My brain was dull and clouded. My intellect was sluggish and inert. But--and this was the terror for me!--within the rank nest of my soul--my spirit--lay coiled two vipers that never ceased from biting me with their poisoned fangs--Self-consciousness and Ambition. I knew myself, and I longed to be other than I was. I watched my own incompetence as one who watches from a tower. I divined how others regarded me--precisely. The blatant and comfortable egoism of a dwarf mind in a dwarf body was never for one moment mine. I was that terrible anomaly, an utterly incomplete and incompetent thing that adored, with a curious wildness of pa.s.sion, completeness, competence.

Nor had I a soul that could ever be satisfied with a one-sided perfection. My desires were Gargantuan. When I was with my cousin Gavin, a fine all-round sportsman, I longed with fury to be a good shot, to throw a fly as he did, to have a perfect seat on a horse. I felt that I would give up years of life to beat him once in any of his pursuits.

When I was with Dr Wedderburn, my desires, equally intense, were utterly different. He represented in my neighbourhood Intellect--with a capital I. A man of about fifty, minister of the parish of Carlounie, he was astonishingly adroit as a controversialist, astonishingly eloquent as a divine. His voice was full of music. His eyes were full of light and of the most superb self-confidence. He rested upon his intellect as a man may rest upon a rock. The power of his personality was calm and immense.

I felt it vehemently. I shook and trembled under it. I hated and loathed the man for it, because I wanted and could never possess it. So, too, I hated my cousin Gavin for his possessions, his long and sure-sighted eyes, great and strong arms, broad chest, lithe legs, bright agility. My body could do nothing. My soul could do nothing--except one great thing.

It could fully observe and comprehend its own impotence. It could fully and desperately envy and pine to be what it could never be. Could never be, do I say? Wait! Remember that is only what I thought then as I sat upon the rock, and, with haggard young eyes, watched the clear brown water slipping furtively past between my knees.

My disease seemed to culminate that day, I remember. I was a sick invalid alone in the mist. Something--it might have been vitriol--was eating into me, eating, eating its way to my very heart, to the core of me. Oh, to be stunted and desire to be straight and tall, to be dwarf and wish to be giant, to be stupid and long to be a genius, to be ugly and yearn to be in face as one of the shining G.o.ds, to have no power over men, and to pine to fascinate, hold, dominate a world of men--this indeed is to be in h.e.l.l! I was in h.e.l.l that Autumn day. I clenched my thin, weak hands together. I clenched my teeth from which the pale lips were drawn back in a grin; and I realised all the spectral crowd of my shortcomings. They stood before me like demons of the Brocken--yes, yes, of the Brocken!--and I cursed G.o.d with the sound of the burn ringing and chattering in my ears. And I devoted Gavin, Doctor Wedderburn, every man highly placed, every lowest peasant, who could do even one of all the things I could not do, to d.a.m.nation. The paroxysm that took hold of me was like a fit, a convulsion. I came out of it white and feeble. And, suddenly, the voice of the burn seemed to come from a long way off. I put out my hand, and took up from the rock on which I had laid it, "Faust." And, scarcely knowing what I did, I began mechanically to read--to the dim rapture of the burn--

"_Scene III.--The Study. Faust (entering, with the poodle)._" I began to read, do I say, mechanically? Yes, it is true, but soon, very soon, the spell of Goethe was laid upon me. I was in the lofty-arched, narrow Gothic chamber, with that living symbol of the weariness, broken ambition, learned despair of all the ages. I was engrossed. I heard the poodle snarling by the stove. I heard the spirits whispering in the corridor. Vapour rose--or was it indeed the mist from the mountains among the birch trees?--and out of the vapour came Mephistopheles in the garb of a travelling scholar. And then--and then the great bargain was struck. I heard--yes, I did, I actually, and most distinctly, heard a voice--Faust's--say, "_Let us the sensual deeps explore.... Plunge we in Time's tumultuous dance, In the rush and roll of circ.u.mstance._" A pause; then the Student's grave and astonished tones came to me: _Eritis sicut Deus, scientes bonum et malum._ The cloak was spread, and on the burning air Faust was wafted to his new life--nay, not to his new life merely, but to life itself. He vanished with his guide in a coloured, flower-like mist. I dropped my hand holding the book down upon the cold rock by which the cold water splashed. It felt burning hot to my touch.

My head fell upon my breast, and I had my dreams--dreams of the life of Faust and of its glories, gained by this bargain that he made. And then--yes, then it was!--the voice of the burn, as from leagues away in the bosom of this very mist, began to sing like a fairy voice, or a voice in dreams, and in visions of the night, "_If it was so then, it might be so now._" At first I scarcely heeded it, for I was enwrapt.

But the song grew louder, more insistent. It was travelling to me from a far country. I heard it coming: "_If it was so then, it might be so now_"--"_If it was so then, it might be so now._" How near it was at last, how loud in my ears! And yet always there was something vague, visionary about it, something of the mist, I think. At length I heard it with the attention that is of earth. I came to myself, out of the narrow Gothic chamber in which the genius of Goethe had prisoned me, and I stared into the mist, which was gathering thicker as the night began to fall. It seemed flower-like, and full of strange and mysterious colour.

I trembled. I got up. Still I heard the voice of the burn singing that monotonous legend, on, and on, and on. Slowly I turned. I climbed the bank of the den. The sheep scattered lethargically at my approach. I pa.s.sed through the creaking iron gate into the garden. Carlounie was before me. There was something altered, something triumphant about its aspect. The voice of the burn faded in a long diminuendo. Yet, even as I gained the door of my house, and, before entering it, paused in an attentive att.i.tude, I heard the water chanting faintly from the den--"_If it was so then, it might be so now._" ... As I came into the hall, in which Gavin and Dr Wedderburn stood together talking earnestly, I remember that I shivered. Yet my cheeks were glowing.

From that moment not a day pa.s.sed without my visiting the burn. It summoned me. Always it sang those words persistently. The sound of the water can be very faintly heard from the windows of Carlounie. Each day, at dawn, I pushed open the lattice of my bedroom and hearkened to hear if the song had changed. Each night, at moon-rise, or in the darkness through which the soft and small rain fell quietly, I leaned over the sill and listened. Sometimes the wind was loud among the mountains.

Sometimes the silence was intense and awful. But in storm or in stillness the burn sang on, ever and ever the same words. At moments I fancied that the voice was as the voice of a man demented, repeating with mirthless frenzy through all his years one hollow sentence. At moments I deemed it the cry of a fair woman, a siren, a Lorelei among my rocks in my valley. Then again I said, "It is a spirit voice, a voice from the inner chamber of my own heart." And--why I know not--at that last fantasy I shuddered. Even in the midnight from my window ledge I leaned while the world slept and I heard the mystic message of the burn.

My visits to its bed were not un.o.bserved. One morning my cousin Gavin said to me roughly, "Why the devil are you always stealing off to that ditch"--so he called the den that was the home of my voice--"when you ought to be practising to conquer your infernal deficiencies? Why, the children of your own keepers laugh at you. Try to shoot straight, man, and be a real man instead of dreaming and idling." I stared at him and answered, "You don't understand everything." Once Dr Wedderburn, who had been my tutor, said to me more kindly, "Alistair, action is better for you than thought. Leave the burn alone. You go there to brood. Try to work, for work is the best man-maker after all."

And to him I said, "Yes, I know!" and flew with a strong wing in the face of his advice. For the voice of the burn was more to me than the voice of Gavin, or of Wedderburn; and the mind of the burn meant more to me than the mind of any man. And so the Autumn died slowly, with a lingering decadence, and shrouded perpetually in mist. I often felt ill, even then. My body was dressed in weakness. Perhaps already the fever was upon me. I wish I could know. Was it crawling in my veins? Was it nestling about my heart and in my brain? Could it be that?...

Certainly during this period life seemed alien to me, and I moved as one apart in a remote world, full of the music of the burn, and full, too, of vague clouds. That is so. Looking back, I know it. Still, I cannot be sure what is the truth. In the late Autumn I paid my last visit to the burn before my illness seized me. The cold of early Winter was in the air and a great stillness. It was afternoon when I left the house walking slowly with my awkward gait. My face, I know, was white and drawn, and I felt that my lips were twitching. I did not carry my volume of Goethe in my hand; but, in its place, held an old book on transcendental magic. The voice of the burn--yes, that alone--had led me to study this book. So now I took it down to the burn. Why? Had I the foolish fancy of introducing my live thing of the den to this strange writing on the black art? Who knows? Perhaps the fever in my veins put the book into my hand. I shivered in the damp cold as I descended the steep ground that lay about the water, which that day seemed to roar in my ears the sentence I had heard so many days and nights. And this time, as I hearkened, my heart and my brain echoed the last words--"_It might be so now._" Gaining the edge of the burn, then in heavy spate, I watched for a while the pa.s.sage of the foam from rock to rock. I peered into the pools, clouded with flood water from the hills, and with whirling or sinking dead leaves. And all my meagre body seemed pulsing with those everlasting words: "Why not now?" I murmured to myself, with a sort of silent sneer, too, at my own absurdity. I remember I glanced furtively around as I spoke. Grey emptiness, grey loneliness, dripping bare trees through whose branches the mist curled silently, cold rocks, the cold flood of the swollen burn--such was the blank prospect that met my eyes.

There was no man near me. There was no one to look at me. I was remote, hidden in a secret place, and the early twilight was already beginning to fall. No one could see me. I opened my old and ragged book, or, rather, let it fall open at a certain page. Upon it I looked for the hundredth time, and read that he who would evoke the Devil must choose a solitary and condemned spot. The burn was solitary. The burn was condemned surely by the despair and by the endless incapacities of the wretched being who owned it. I had taken off my shoes and placed them upon a rock. My feet were bare. My head was covered. I now furtively proceeded to gather together a small heap of sticks and leaves, and to these I set fire, after several attempts. As the flames at last crept up, the mist gathered more closely round me and my fire, as if striving to warm itself at the blaze. The voice of the burn mingled with the uneasy crackle of the twigs, and a murmur of its words seemed to emanate also from the flames, two elements uniting to imitate the utterance of man to my brain, already surely tormented with fever. And now, with my eyes upon my book, I proceeded to trace with the sharp point of a stick in some sandy soil between two rocks a rough Goetic Circle of Black evocations and pacts. From time to time I paused in my work and glanced uneasily about me, but I saw only the mists and the waters.

At length my task was finished, and the time had arrived for the supreme effort of my insane and childish folly. Standing at Amasarac in the Circle, I said aloud the formula of Evocation of the Grand Grimoire, ending with the words "Jehosua, Evam, Zariat, natmik, Come, come, come."

My voice died away in the twilight, and I stood among the grey rocks waiting, mad creature that I surely was! But only the rippling voice of the burn answered my adjuration. Then I repeated the words in a louder tone, adding menaces and imprecations to my formula. And all the time the fire I had kindled sprang up into the mist; and the twilight of the heavy Autumn fell slowly round me. Again I paused, and again my madness received no satisfaction, no response. But it seemed to me that I heard the browsing sheep on the summit of the right bank of the gully scatter as if at the approach of some one. Yet there was no stir of footsteps.

It must have been my fancy, or the animals were merely changing their feeding ground in a troop, as they sometimes will, for no a.s.signable cause. And now I made one last effort, urged by the voice of the burn, which sang so loudly the words which had mingled with my dream of Faust.

I cried aloud the supreme appellation, making an effort that brought out the sweat on my forehead, and set the pulses leaping in my thin and shivering body. "_Chavajoth! chavajoth! chavajoth! I command thee by the Key of Solomon and the great name Semhamphoras._"

A little way up the course of the burn the dead wood cracked and shuffled under the pressure of descending feet. Again I heard a scattering of the sheep upon the hillside. My hair stirred on my head under my cap, and the noise of the falling water was intolerably loud to me. I wanted to hear plainly, to hear what was coming down to me in the mist. The brush-wood sang nearer. In the heavy and damp air there was the small, sharp report of a branch snapped from a tree. I heard it drop among the ferns close to me. And then in the mist and in the twilight I saw a slim figure standing motionless. It was vague, but less vague than a shadow. It seemed to be a man, or a youth, clad in a grey suit that could scarcely be differentiated from the mist. The flames of my fire, bent by a light breeze that had sprung up, stretched themselves towards it, as if to salute it. And now I could not hear any movement of the sheep; evidently they had gone to a distance. At first, seized with a strange feeling of extreme, almost unutterable fear, I neither moved nor spoke. Then, making a strong effort to regain control of my ordinary faculties, I cried out in the twilight--

"What is that? What is it?"

"Only a stranger who has missed his way on the mountain, and wants to go on to Wester Denoon."

The voice that came to me from the figure beyond the fire sounded, I remember, quite young, like the voice of a boy. It was clear and level, and perhaps a little formal. So that was all. A tourist--that was all!

"Can you direct me on the way?" the voice said.

I gave the required direction slowly, for I was still confused, nervous, exhausted with my insane practices in the den. But the youth--as I supposed he was--did not move away at once.

"What are you doing by this fire?" he said. "I heard your voice calling by the torrent among the trees when I was a very long way off."

Strangely, I did not resent the question. Still more strangely, I was impelled to give him the true answer to it.

"Raising the Devil!" he said. "And did he come to you?"

"No; of course not. You must think me mad."

"And why do you call him?"

Suddenly a desire to confide in this stranger, whose face I could not see now, whose shadowy form I should, in all probability, never see again, came upon me. My usual nervousness deserted me. I let loose my heart in a turbulent crowd of words. I explained my impotence of body and of mind to this grey traveller in the twilight. I dwelt upon my misery. I repeated the cry of the burn and related my insane dream of imitating Faust, of making my poor pact with Lucifer, with the Sphinx of mediaeval terrors. When I ceased, the boy's voice answered:--

"They say that in these modern days Satan has grown exigent. It is not enough to dedicate to him your own soul; but you must also pay a tribute of souls to the Caesar of h.e.l.l."

"A tribute of souls?"