Merry-Garden and Other Stories Part 6

"And inside?"

"I don't know. I've never been inside. But stop a moment--you haven't heard the half of it yet! There's a road comes downhill to the sh.o.r.e, between the churchyard wall--there's a heap of greyish silvery-looking stuff, by the way, growing on the coping--something like lavender, with yellow blossoms--Where was I? Oh yes, and on the other side of the road there's a tall hedge with elms above it. It breaks off where the road takes a bend around and in front of the churchyard gate, with a yard or two of turf on the side towards the water, and from the turf a clean drop of three feet, or a little less, on to the foresh.o.r.e. The foresh.o.r.e is all grey stones, round and flat, the sort you'd choose to play what's called ducks-and-drakes. It goes curving along, and the road with it, until the beach ends with a spit of rock, and over the rock a kind of cottage (only bigger, but thatched and whitewashed just like a cottage) with a garden, and in the garden a laburnum in flower, leaning slantwise,"

--Sir John raised his open hand and bent his forefinger to indicate the angle--"and behind the cottage a reddish cliff with a few clumps of furze overhanging it, and the turf on it stretching up to a larch plantation . . . ."

Sir John paused and rubbed his forehead meditatively.

"At least," he resumed, "I _think_ it's a larch plantation; but the scene gets confused above a certain height. It's the foresh.o.r.e, and the church and the cottage that I always see clearest. Yes, and I forgot to tell you--I'm a poor hand at description--that there's a splash of whitewash on the spit of rock, and an iron ring fixed there, for warping-in a vessel, maybe: and sometimes there's a boat, out on the water. . . ."

"You describe it vividly enough," said Mr. Molesworth as Sir John paused and, apparently on the point of resuming his story, checked himself, tossed his cigar out of the window, and chose a fresh one from his pocket-case. "Well, and what happens in your dream?"

Sir John struck a match, puffed his fresh cigar alight, deliberately examined the ignited end, and flung the match away. "Nothing happens.

I told you it was just a scene, didn't I?"

"You said that somehow the dream was an unpleasant one."

"So I did. So it is. It makes me d.a.m.nably uncomfortable every time I dream it; though for the life of me I can't tell you why."

"The picture as you draw it seems to me quite a pleasant one."

"So it is, again."

"And you say nothing happens?"

"Well--" Sir John took the cigar from his mouth and looked at it-- "nothing ever happens in it, definitely: nothing at all. But always in the dream there's a smell of lemon verbena--it comes from the garden--and a curious hissing noise--and a sense of a black man's being somehow mixed up in it all. . . ."

"A black man?"

"Black or brown . . . in the dream I don't think I've ever actually seen him. The hissing sound--it's like the hiss of a snake, only ten times louder--may have come into the dream of late years. As to that I won't swear. But I'm dead certain there was always a black man mixed up in it, or what I may call a sense of one: and that, as you will say, is the most curious part of the whole business."

Sir John flipped away the ash of his cigar and leant forward impressively.

"If I wasn't, as I say, dead sure of his having been in it from the first," he went on, "I could tell you the exact date when he took a hand in the game: because," he resumed after another pause, "I once actually saw what I'm telling you."

"But you told me," objected Mr. Molesworth, "that you had never actually seen it."

"I was wrong then. I saw it once, in a Burmese boy's hand at Maulmain.

The old Eastern trick, you know: palmful of ink and the rest of it.

There was nothing particular about the boy except an ugly scar on his cheek (caused, I believe, by his mother having put him down to sleep in the fireplace while the clay floor of it was nearly red-hot under the ashes). His master called himself his grandfather--a holy-looking man with a white beard down to his loins: and the pair of them used to come up every year from Mergui or some such part, at the Full Moon of Taboung, which happens at the end of March and is the big feast in Maulmain.

The pair of them stood close by the great entrance of the Shway Dagone, where the three roads meet, and just below the long flights of steps leading up to the paG.o.da. The second day of the feast I was making for the entrance with a couple of naval officers I had picked up at the Club, and my man, Moung Gway, following as close as he could keep in the crowd.

Just as we were going up the steps, the old impostor challenged me, and, partly to show my friends what the game was like--for they were new to the country--I stopped and found a coin for him. He poured the usual dollop of ink into the boy's hand, and, by George, sir, next minute I was staring at the very thing I'd seen a score of times in my dreams but never out of them. I tell you, there's more in that Eastern hanky-panky than meets the eye; beyond that I'll offer no opinion. Outside the magic I believe the whole business was a put-up job, to catch my attention and take me unawares. For when I stepped back, pretty well startled, and blinking from the strain of keeping my attention fixed on the boy's palm, a man jumped forward from the crowd and precious nearly knifed me. If it hadn't been for Moung Gway, who tripped him up and knocked him sideways, I should have been a dead man in two twos--for my friends were taken aback by the suddenness of it. But in less than a minute we had him down and the handcuffs on him; and the end was, he got five years' hard, which means hefting chain-shot from one end to another of the prison square and then hefting it back again. There was a rather neat little Burmese girl, you see--a sort of niece of Moung Gway's--who had taken a fancy to me; and this turned out to be a disappointed lover, just turned up from a voyage to Cagayan in a paddy-boat. I believed he had fixed it up with the venerable one to hold me with the magic until he got in his stroke.

Venomous beggars, those Burmans, if you cross 'em in the wrong way!

The fellow got his release a week before I left Maulmain for good, and the very next day Moung Gway was found, down by the quays, dead as a haddock, with a wound between the shoulder-blades as neat as if he'd been measured for it. Oh, I could tell you a story or two about those fellows!"

"It's easily explained, at any rate," Mr. Molesworth suggested, "why you see a dark-skinned man in your dream."

"But I tell you, my dear sir, he has been a part of the dream from the beginning . . . before I went to Wren's, and long before ever I thought of Burmah. He's as old as the church itself, and the foresh.o.r.e and the cottage--the whole scene, in fact--though I can't say he's half as distinct. I can't tell you in the least, for instance, what his features are like. I've said that the upper part of the dream is vague to me; at the end of the foresh.o.r.e, that is, where the cottage stands; the church tower I can see plainly enough to the very top. But over by the cottage-- above the porch, as you may say--everything seems to swim in a mist: and it's up in that mist the fellow's head and shoulders appear and vanish. Sometimes I think he's looking out of the window at me, and draws back into the room as if he didn't want to be seen; and the mist itself gathers and floats away with the hissing sound I told you about. . . ."

Sir John's voice paused abruptly. The train was drawing near the M---- viaduct, and Mr. Molesworth from force of habit had turned his eyes to the window, to gaze down the green valley. He withdrew them suddenly, and looked around at his companion.

"Ah, to be sure," he said vaguely; "I had forgotten the hissing sound."

It was curious, but as he spoke he himself became aware of a loud hissing sound filling his ears. The train lurched and jolted heavily.

"Hullo!" exclaimed Sir John, half rising in his seat, "something's wrong."

He was staring past Mr. Molesworth and out of the window. "Nasty place for an accident, too," he added in a slow, strained voice.

The two men looked at each other for a moment. Sir John's face wore a tense expression--a kind of galvanised smile. Mr. Molesworth closed his eyes, instinctively concealing his sudden sickening terror of what an accident just there must mean: and for a second or so he actually had a sensation of dropping into s.p.a.ce. He remembered having felt something like it in dreams three or four times in his life: and at the same instant he remembered a country superst.i.tion gravely imparted to him in childhood by his old nurse, that if you dreamt of falling and didn't wake up before reaching the bottom, you would surely die. The absurdity of it chased away his terror, and he opened his eyes and looked about him with a short laugh. . . .

The train still jolted heavily, but had begun to slow down, and Mr.

Molesworth drew a long breath as a glance told him that they were past the viaduct. Sir John had risen, and was leaning out of the farther window.

Something had gone amiss, then. But what?

He put the question aloud. Sir John, his head and shoulders well outside the carriage-window, did not answer. Probably he did not hear.

As the train ran into M---- Station and came to a standstill, Mr.

Molesworth caught a glimpse of the station-master, in his gold-braided cap, by the door of the booking-office. He wore a grave, almost a scared look. The three or four country-people on the sunny platform seemed to have their gaze drawn by the engine, and somebody ahead there was shouting. Sir John Crang, without a backward look, flung the door open and stepped out. Mr. Molesworth was preparing to follow--and by the cramped feeling in his fingers was aware at the same instant that he had been gripping the arm-rest almost desperately--when the guard of the train came running by and paused to thrust his head in at the open doorway to explain.

"Engine's broken her coupling-rod, sir--just before we came to the viaduct. Mercy for us she didn't leave the rails."

"Mercy indeed, as you say," Mr. Molesworth a.s.sented. "I suppose we shall be hung up here until they send a relief down?"

The guard--Mr. Molesworth knew him as 'George' by name, and by habit constantly polite--turned and waved his flag hurriedly, in acknowledgment of the shouting ahead, before answering--

"You may count on half an hour's delay, sir. Lucky it's no worse.

You'll excuse me--they're calling for me down yonder."

He ran on, and Mr. Molesworth stepped out upon the platform, of which this end was already deserted, all the pa.s.sengers having alighted and hurried forward to inspect the damaged engine. A few paces beyond the door he met the station-master racing back to despatch a telegram.

"It seems that we've had a narrow escape," said Mr. Molesworth.

The station-master touched his hat and plunged into his office.

Mr. Molesworth, instead of joining the crowd around the engine, halted before a small pile of luggage on a bench outside the waiting-room and absent-mindedly scanned the labels.

Among the parcels lay a fis.h.i.+ng-rod in a canvas case and a wicker creel, the pair of them labelled and bearing the name of an acquaintance of his-- a certain Sir Warwick Moyle, baronet and county magistrate, beside whom he habitually sat at Quarter Sessions.

"I had no idea," Mr. Molesworth mused, "that Moyle was an angler.

It would be a fair joke, anyway, to borrow his rod and fill up the time.-- How long before the relief comes down?" he asked, intercepting the station-master as he came rus.h.i.+ng out from his office and slammed the door behind him.

"Maybe an hour, sir, before we get you started again. I can't honestly promise you less than forty minutes."

"Very well, then: I'm going to borrow Sir Warwick's rod, there, and fill up the time," said Mr. Molesworth, pointing at it.

The station-master apparently did not hear; at any rate he pa.s.sed on without remonstrance. Mr. Molesworth slung the creel over his shoulder, picked up the rod, and stepped out beyond the station gateway upon the road.

II.

The road ran through a cutting, sunless, cooled by many small springs of water trickling down the rock-face, green with draperies of the hart's-tongue and common polypody ferns; and emerged again into warmth upon a curve of the hillside facing southward down the coombe, and almost close under the second span of the viaduct, where the tall trestles plunged down among the tree-tops like gigantic stilts, and the railway left earth and spun itself across the chasm like a line of gossamer, its criss-crossed timbers so delicately pencilled against the blue that the whole structure seemed to swing there in the morning breeze. Above it, in heights yet more giddy, the larks were chiming; and Mr. Molesworth's heart went up to those clear heights with a sudden lift.