“The most evil heap of stones I know in Nevilton,” remarked Mr. Quincunx, moving towards his gate, and making a slight dismissing gesture with his hand, “is the heap in the Methodist cemetery. You know the one I mean, Andersen? The one up by Seven Ashes, where the four roads meet. It is just inside the entrance, on the left hand. They throw upon it all the larger stones they find when they dig the graves. I have often picked up bits of bones there, and pieces of skulls. It is an interesting place, a very curious place, and quite easy to find. There haven’t been many burials there lately, because most of the Methodists nowadays prefer the churchyard. But there was one last spring. That was the burial of Glory Lintot. I was there myself, and saw her put in. It’s an extraordinary place. Anyone who likes to look at what people can write on tombstones would be delighted with it.”
By this time, by means of a series of vague ushering movements, such as he might have used to get rid of an admirable but dangerous dog, Mr. Quincunx had got his visitor as far as the gate. This he opened, with as easy and natural an air as he could assume, and stood ostentatiously aside, to let the unfortunate man pass out.
James Andersen moved slowly into the road. “Remember!” he said. “You will avoid everything you hate! There’s more in the west-wind than you imagine, these strange days. That’s why the rooks are calling. Listen to them!”
He waved his hand and strode rapidly up the lane.
Mr. Quincunx gazed after the retreating figure till it disappeared, and then returned wearily to his work. He picked up his hoe and leaned heavily upon it, buried in thought. Thus he remained for the space of several minutes.
“He is right,” he muttered, raising his head at last. “The rooks are beginning to gather. That means another summer is over, — and a good thing, too! I suppose I ought to have taken him back to Nevilton. But he is right about the rooks.”
CHAPTER XIX PLANETARY INTERVENTION
THE long summer afternoon was nearly over by the time James Andersen reached the Seven Ashes. The declining sun had sunk so low that it was invisible from the spot where he stood, but its last horizontal rays cast a warm ruddy light over the tree-tops in the valley. The high and exposed intersection of sandy lanes, which for time immemorial had borne this title, was, at the epoch which concerns us, no longer faithful to its name.
The ash-trees which Andersen now surveyed, with the feverish glance of mental obsession, were not seven in number. They were indeed only three; and, of these three, one was no more than a time-worn stump, and the others but newly-planted saplings. Such as they were, however, they served well enough to continue the tradition of the place, and their presence enhanced with a note of added melancholy the gloomy character of the scene.
Seven Ashes, with its cross-roads, formed indeed the extreme northern angle of the high winding ridge which terminated at Wild Pine. Approached from the road leading to this latter spot, — a road darkened on either hand by wind-swept Scotch-firs — it was the sort of place where, in less civilized times, one might have expected to encounter a threatening highwayman, or at least to have stumbled upon some sinister witch-figure stooping over an unholy task or groping among the weeds. Even in modern times and in bright sunshine the spot was not one where a traveller was induced to linger upon his way or to rest himself. When overcast, as it was at the moment of Andersen’s approach, by the coming on of twilight, it was a place from which a normal-minded person would naturally be in haste to turn There was something ominous in its bleak exposure to the four quarters of the sky, and something full of ghostly suggestiveness in the gaping mouths of the narrow lanes that led away from it.
There was, however, another and a much more definite justification for the quickening, at this point, of any wayfarer’s steps who knew the locality. A stranger to the place, glancing across an empty field, would have observed with no particular interest the presence of a moderately high stone wall protecting a small square enclosure. Were such a one acquainted with the survivals of old usage in English villages, he might have supposed these walls to shut in the now unused space of what was formerly the local “pound,” or repository for stray animals. Such travellers as were familiar with Nevilton knew, however, that sequestered within this citadel of desolation were no living horses nor cattle, but very different and much quieter prisoners. The Methodist cemetery there, dates back, it is said, to the days of religious persecution, to the days of Whitfield and Wesley, if not even further.
Our fugitive from the society of those who regard their minds as normally constituted, cast an excited and recognizant eye upon this forlorn enclosure. Plucking a handful of leaves from one of the ash-trees and thrusting them into his pocket, some queer legend — half-remembered in his agitated state — impelling him to this quaint action, he left the roadway, crossed the field, and pushing open the rusty iron gate of the little burying-ground, burst hurriedly in among its weather-stained memorials of the dead.
Though not of any great height, the enclosing walls of the place were sufficient to intensify by several degrees the gathering shadows. Outside, in the open field, one would have anticipated a clear hour of twilight before the darkness fell; but here, among the graves of these humble recalcitrants against spiritual authority, it seemed as though the plunge of the planet into its diurnal obscuring was likely to be retarded for only a few brief moments.
James Andersen sat down upon a nameless mound, and fixed his gaze upon the heap of stones referred to by Mr. Quincunx. The evening was warm and still, and though the sky yet retained much of its lightness of colour, the invading darkness — like a beast on padded feet — was felt as a palpable presence moving slowly among the tombs.
The stone-carver began muttering in a low voice scattered and incoherent repetitions of his conversation with the potato-digger. But his voice suddenly died away under a startling interruption. He became aware that the heavy cemetery gate was being pushed open from outside.
Such is the curious law regulating the action of human nerves, and making them dependent upon the mood of the mind to which they are attached, that an event which to a normal consciousness is fraught with ghostly terror, to a consciousness already strained beyond the breaking point, appears as something natural and ordinary. It is one of the privileges of mania, that those thus afflicted should be freed from the normal oppression of human terror. A madman would take a ghost into his arms.
On this occasion, however, the most normal nerves would have suffered no shock from the figure that presented itself in the entrance when the door was fully opened. A young girl, pale and breathless, rushed impulsively into the cemetery, and catching sight of Andersen at once, hastened straight to him across the grave-mounds.
“I was coming back from the village,” she gasped, preventing him with a trembling pressure of her hand from rising from his seat, and casting herself down beside him, “and I met Mr. Clavering. He told me you had gone off somewhere and I guessed at once it was to Dead Man’s Lane. I said nothing to him, but as soon as he had left me, I ran nearly all the way to the cottage. The gentleman there told me to follow you. He said it was on his conscience that he had advised you to come up here. He said he was just making up his mind to come on after you, but he thought it was better for me to come. So here I am! James — dear James — you are not really ill are you? They frightened me, those two, by what they said. They seemed to be afraid that you would hurt yourself if you went off alone. But you wouldn’t James dear, would you? You would think of me a little?”