NIGHTS OF THE ROUND TABLE Read online

  Satisfied, Miss Eustasia cast about for another reason, but found none, and at that moment Ellen stepped into the room from the garden, trailing a branch of bramble behind her, her dark hair starred with dew-wet convolvuli. She took no notice of her aunt, but stood with her face pressed against the cold pane, staring out into the slowly darkening garden towards the Rath.

  Miss Eustasia spoke sharply.

  ‘Really, Ellen! You might at least, when you do condescend to come in, take a little trouble to be pleasant! I get very little of your company these days.’

  Ellen smiled faintly and came over to her aunt, laying a slender arm scented with pines and bracken across the old lady’s thin shoulders.

  ‘Poor auntie! Never mind—I am very happy. Happier than I knew it was possible to be. What’s worrying you, any way, dear?’

  The old lady bit off a thread of silk viciously.

  ‘Just this, my dear—you’re not leading a healthy life, mooning about by yourself these days. What’s happened to your golf that you were so keen on? Young Anselm came over yesterday to ask you to play, and you were away somewhere. . . .’

  Ellen laughed. Now, as it always did sooner or later, the vaguely dreamy mood began to wear off, and the old Ellen, bright, poised, and self-sufficient, was speaking.

  ‘That all? Dear me, I’ll write him at once and suggest a day next week.’

  She moved to the writing-table and opened the blotter as she spoke. Eustasia finished off a flower of her embroidery emphatically as she began again.

  ‘That reminds me—have you done anything about that path through the Rath? It’s too silly for you to go a quarter of a mile round by the road when with a little trouble you could have that path cut.’

  Ellen’s brow was wrinkled, almost as if she tried to catch a fleeting though half-forgotten thought.

  ‘Oh yes. I’d somehow forgotten that. . . . I suppose it had better be done. It seems difficult to get men here though—perhaps I’d better leave it.’

  ‘Rubbish!’ the old lady snapped. ‘Now you’re writing, write to that firm at Little Witchet we passed in the car the other day, and tell them to send three or four men. Today’s Friday—say they had better come on Monday.’

  The room fell silent save for the faint scratching of Miss Vandermyl’s pen on the paper—it was getting dark very rapidly, thought Miss Eustasia, and what a nuisance that strand of ivy tapping against the pane was—odd that she who was so sensitive to irritating noises had never noticed it before. Sitting back, Ellen sealed up both envelopes, and slipped them into her pocket. The tapping of the ivy seemed to have worried her too, for she opened the window and broke the trail off, impatiently flinging it into the garden. Stretching out her arms she yawned, and laughed.

  ‘Well, that’s done! Funny how I came to put off writing about that path these last two weeks—quite unlike my usual business-like ways. Papa always said I had the head of a business man—how he’d have laughed to see me wandering for hours about a damp wood!’ Her laughter was frankly amused, and it was the old Ellen that glanced down into her aunt’s eyes—cool, self-reliant, dominating. Miss Eustasia patted her hand.

  ‘Glad to see you more like yourself again, dear. I admit that craze of yours for perpetually exploring the Rath worried me a little—what made you take to doing it, now?’

  A faint puzzled crease crossed the girl’s white forehead, and at the moment a belated wren fluttered against the rising wind past the window, cheeping feebly. Ellen passed her hand across her brow worriedly, then dropped it and laughed lightly.

  ‘I really couldn’t possibly say, dearest! I can’t think now why I did it—just a whim, I suppose. Now I’m going up to dress for dinner—come along.’

  It seemed to Miss Eustasia afterwards that never had Ellen been so bright and like her usual sparkling self as that last dinner-time; the idle, dreaming Ellen of the last two weeks seemed to have vanished like snow in spring, and thankfully Eustasia mentally composed another letter to Papa Vandermyl that should set his mind completely at rest concerning his wilful daughter, whose insistence on the purchase of the Hall had worried him considerably. They had coffee in the pretty drawing-room, and Ellen played . . . bright crisp rag-time music, sharply contrasted to her recent craze for Sibelius, Dvorak and Ravel. There was a small fire, for the storm had fulfilled its promise, and the bright rain spattered the long panes persistently, while a chilly little wind forced its way through the chinks of the curtains.

  The evening passed peacefully, and at last Miss Eustasia, who had been nodding steadily before the fire for the last half-hour, rose and yawned, putting her eternal embroidery together.

  ‘Well—you play delightfully, dear. But I think it’s about time for bed, don’t you? Are you coming?

  Ellen shook her head, her fingers still wandering absently over the keys.

  ‘No. Not yet. Very soon, I think—goodnight, dear.’

  The door closed behind the old lady, and Ellen’s hands fell from the keys. There was that tiresome ivy again tapping—it must be another piece. Tomorrow she would have the whole thing cut away—it was maddening, this eternal tapping. Settling herself into a chair by the fire with a book she tried to read, but the tapping proved too distracting and at last, with an impatient exclamation, she got up and went to the window. Pulling aside the curtain, she gave a sudden gasp of terrified astonishment—pressed against the panes, his long-nailed fingers playing a tattoo on the glass, his light eyes gleaming luminous in the light, stood the Man in Green! Beckoning, he retreated, and vanished in the dark, wind-tossed trees—mechanically, with no thought of refusal, she fetched a cloak from the hall, and stepping out into the whirl of wind and rain, went steadily down the dark garden. The moon was full, but ragged clouds sailing across it obscured its light except for occasional glimpses—there was a faint growl of thunder in the distance, and the gusts of sharp wind flapped and buffeted her, flinging showers of heavy drops upon her uncovered hair from the overhanging trees. In the open the light rain stung her face like tiny needles; a sob rose in her throat as with wide, fixed bright eyes she pressed steadily on down the sloping lawns to the waiting Rath.

  Her mind was vaguely wandering down half-forgotten paths—she had been made one with the Rath, received into its arms—through Someone, but who she had forgotten. . . . The keeper—but, of course, she had always known he was no keeper . . . who was he? Never mind, it didn’t matter, and she couldn’t remember anything clearly. Only that there in the Rath she had known joy unspeakable, lain with her cheek pressed against the grass and bracken, played—so long ago it seemed!—with rabbit and wren and chaffinch, unfearing, friendly, with Someone’s arm about her . . . drunk of its tiny stream, decked her hair with its flowers; the Rath had received her, and she had turned upon it and stabbed it to the heart. By a letter—a cruel letter, that even now lay in the pocket of the coat she wore. Now she was going to meet her just punishment. . . . With dark eyes wide and vague, she stumbled down the last steep grass slope and stopped, panting heavily, against the fence. Across the top the keeper leant, regarding her strangely from beneath his pulled-down cap, shiny with rain—she noticed dully that a spraying trail of ivy hung from his buttonhole, and idly wondered why; the brown hands of the man in green were clasped loosely together along the top of the fence, and with a sudden sick remembrance she thought again of the first time she had seen them thus. . . . The wind whistled and roared, rising to a gale around them, and in a lull she heard Rob Woodson speak.

  ‘So you have come to the Rath again, little lady? To the Rath for the last time?’ His tone was light, half-laughing, but a faint cold hint of menace rang through it, and his odd, luminous eyes regarded her curiously as she stood there, plucking unthinkingly at the moss on the fence, her dark curly hair whipped to a halo about her head, those beautiful eyes regarding him dully. Her mouth quivered suddenly, piteously, as she replied:

  ‘Yes. I have come—for the last time. . . . What—what are you going to do with me?’ Thr
ough the vaguely hypnotised look in her eyes crept a real gleam of fear, and she shivered involuntarily as he stretched out a long hand in invitation. Patting the place where the broken slats still spoke so vividly of that wonderful day two weeks ago—or was it two hundred years?—he smiled at her, shrinking in nameless terror on the other side.

  ‘You have been made free of the Rath, fair Ellen! Why do you fear it?’

  She raised tortured eyes to his, dumbly, and his smile broadened, eyes narrowing as he watched her terror-stricken face . . . grim fear held her in an icy grip, and feebly she fought with all that was left her of sanity to resist, but his eyes were merciless. Trembling, she mounted the fence, and as she balanced on the top, suddenly, swiftly, he held out his arms to her, his head flung back, laughing, a slant moonbeam gleaming on his light, cruel eyes, mocking, triumphant, inhuman.

  ‘Come—let go and come to my arms, pretty maiden! Fall—fall, you who know what no other woman has known, and must die for the knowing—come to me!’

  With a shouting rush and flurry of wind, with a beating of rain about her, the last shred of resistance fled from the girl as she fell forward, and dimly through the gathering mists she heard the voice of the Man in Green above her, through the wild howling of the gale that rocked the groaning trees—light, joyous, triumphant, as his lips closed on hers. . . .

  ‘The Rath has received you, maiden, and the Rath rejects you, in this my last kiss on your human lips! For I—Rob Woodson—son of the woods, I am Robin, and this is my Rath!

  * * * * *

  A few months later the Hall was up for sale, and rebought by Sir George Ruddock, sorely repentant at ever having sold the house of his fathers; so the Ruddocks came back to Ghyll, and the pretty American faded into a mere story, whispered to terrified ears on winter’s evenings.

  But far across the seas, in bustling New York, an anxious father goes from specialist to specialist with a lovely dark-eyed girl, once bright, alert, vivacious, now blank and dull, half-witted almost, with the springs of her vivid womanhood dried up and dead within her.

  Now and then she gets restless and cries a little, on a wet spring night, and always she has ivy and green things of the wood in water in her room; but generally she goes through life smiling vaguely, gentle, silent and empty of soul as a doll. Indeed, as one great specialist said to another aside, too low for the agonised father to hear:

  ‘She’s as much mentality as a china doll now—no use to anyone, ever any more. Some shock must have killed the springs of vitality—but I wonder what it was?’

  He may well wonder, since Ellen Vandermyl is the only one who knows, and she can only drift through life smiling at nothing, silent, with her womanhood dead within her since Robin Goodfellow kissed the soul away from her one stormy night, long ago, in a green glade in England.

  March

  The Hypnotist’s Story

  The Woozle

  ‘It was some years ago, to begin at the beginning. The characters in this story—all well known to me—are a Mr and Mrs Redmayes, the child Tony Hurst, and his nursemaid, Ethel Alford.

  ‘Now, Tony Hurst was Mrs Redmayes’s son by her first husband—an attractive, sturdy child of about six, with a pair of profoundly serious dark eyes. Mrs Redmayes was a very pretty, spoilt woman, married absurdly young, during the war, to Hurst, who was killed at the front when the boy was about three years old. I gather Neil Hurst was an Irishman, very handsome, ultra-sensitive, and psychic to a degree; she told me herself he used to frighten her to death during their married life by talking about the fairies and bogles and spirits of the glen in which he quite thoroughly believed. They fell in love and married in the first glamorous moment of young passion that was the forerunner of so many hasty marriages during the war, but, in this case, death, not disillusionment, cut short the romance, and after a few years, he was killed. Tony was only a baby of three when his father died, and at first she was passionately devoted to him, but she was very young, and naturally gay and thoughtless, and when Redmayes came along and fell in love with her, it was only natural that her love for him swamped, pro tem, her love for the child. Redmayes was a nice enough fellow, wealthy and young, and devoted to her.

  ‘Neil Hurst had been poor, and this sudden change in her life, from poverty to wealth, from the dull round of life in shoddy furnished rooms with a slatternly maid to a charming flat in Curzon Street, from cheap reach-me-down clothes to smart frocks, dinners, dances, all sorts of gaiety—for Redmayes was a popular fellow and loved entertaining and being entertained—I suppose went more or less to her head. At all events, the little chap Tony, from having his mother at his side all day and every day, found a sudden change. True, he had a splendid nursery, heaps of toys, new suits, a pony to ride in the Park and all that sort of thing, but his pretty young mother, now surrounded by admiring friends, and plunging deeper day by day into the whirl of London life, barely found time now to do more than rush in to kiss her small son good morning or good night. One can’t blame her, I suppose, altogether. . . you fellows must think me rather prolix, but this has a bearing on the story I’m going to tell you, so have patience.

  ‘Redmayes was a generous, good-hearted fellow, and fond of the child, but naturally, Tony wasn’t his own, so it didn’t occur to him to think very much about him, and he was desperately proud of his pretty wife, so they were perpetually out together, and Tony was left very much to his own devices. But of course he complained, childlike, and doubtless the perpetual inquiries for his mother were rather trying to his nurse, a young woman with a kind enough heart, but very much engrossed, it subsequently turned out, with her own love affair with the valet in the flat below. She was in the habit of shutting the flat up with the child asleep in it, when her master and mistress were out—which was, of course, nine nights out of ten—and going down to meet her sweetheart—an untrustworthy trick to play, but she was young and thought no harm could come to the child as long as the door was locked and the fire protected.

  ‘One night Tony had a restless fit and refused to fall asleep; probably he had a slight chill or headache, or some childish ailment, but at all events he was cross and wakeful.

  ‘Perhaps the sight of his pretty mother as she ran down the stairs in a new and gorgeous frock, too hurried to stop and kiss him good night, had upset him with its reminder of the days not so long vanished when it was Mummy’s hand that tucked him up and Mummy’s voice that bade him “shut eye-peeps, sonny, and go to sleep”. At all events, sleep he would not, and Ethel, more and more impatient to get away for the precious hour with her young man, waxed more and more irritated as the time wore on. Twice she thought the child safely asleep, and, on her tiptoeing to the door the little fretful voice had arisen.

  ‘“Ethel! Where you goin’ to, Ethel? I want a drink!” or a pillow turned, or a toy found, or something done, after the usual manner of a peevish, restless child. When this happened for the fifth time Ethel lost her temper completely, and as she tucked up the rumpled bedclothes she spoke, viciously:

  ‘“Look here, Master Tony, I’ve ’ad about enough of your noise for tonight. I’m going to turn the light down, and if you don’t lie quiet and go to sleep like a good boy, I’ll tell the bogey what lives in the dark cupboard to come out and punish you for being so naughty—there now!”

  The child turned suddenly arrested eyes upon her.

  ‘“In the toy cupboard—somekin lives in there?” His startled gaze surveyed the girl as, emboldened by what she considered her success, she proceeded to embroider her tale.

  ‘“Yes—and what’d mother do if she found her little boy gone one fine day? He’s after all naughty boys what don’t do what they’re told, he is—just waits till it’s dark and quiet, and then he comes creeping out of his cupboard, creeping and creeping . . .”

  ‘The wide eyes turned from her face to the open-gaping mouth of the dark toy cupboard beside the fireplace, then back again; there was a dawning terror in them, but the foolish girl did not see, and when he lay d
own obediently and let her tuck him up and turn the light low she inwardly congratulated herself upon her astuteness on finding a method of silencing the eternal clatter of the little tongue. To her secret surprise he did not even make his usual protest at the lowering of the light, but lay curled in a little heap deep under the bedclothes. His eyes followed her as she went, unblinking, wide with the first touch of fear, and a hand laid on the tiny tight-curled body would have felt it shaking, shaking. . . .

  ‘Ethel Alford returned to the nursery ten minutes or so before her master and mistress were due home, in high spirits, and a new bangle from her admirer. She took a peep at her charge, and went to bed contented that all was well. True, the child had fallen asleep at last, but if she had had any knowledge of children, she would have noticed that he had not moved one inch from the bunched-up position in which she left him, deep in the cot under the clothes, and these were ominously dragged over his head and held there in a small clenched hand.

  ‘He was subdued for the next few days, and played quietly; trotted at her heels in the Park instead of romping with his usual group of small friends, and behaved with exemplary propriety. As a matter of fact, Ethel had forgotten her hasty remark altogether, and was rather startled and none too pleased when one day he asked suddenly:

  ‘“Ethel! Does he still live there?” A small hand pointed to the toy cupboard, and the blue eyes that turned up to hers were a shade dilated in the firelight. It was nearly seven o’clock, and bedtime drawing near, and the shadows, the deep shadows that were once so warm and friendly, were already beginning to play in the comers of the big nursery.