Chapter VII

The advent of the new tutor was followed by a period of cold and wet and stormy weather, during which, except for a daily walk along heavy, muddy roads, under grey skies and dripping trees, they were kept pretty closely within doors. But when this was past the summer renewed itself, and a golden sleepy July followed on a rainy June. Rusk had dropped by now completely into the ways of his new life. The strangeness had worn off; he had had time to look about him; and he had already formed the basis of the friendship that was henceforward to bind him more and more closely to his pupil.

He was somewhat surprised to learn from Denis that the Bracknels never went away for the summer, but he was not, in his present surroundings, greatly dismayed by the prospect. These surroundings he thought extremely pleasing. The house seemed a fairly modern one and could boast more of comfort than of beauty, but if it could pretend neither to ornament nor antiquity, it had at least been erected on an admirably chosen site. It stood upon an eminence just high enough to give a charming view from certain spots, where one could see out through fine old trees that spread great gnarled roots and branches over smooth, close turf away to a low curving chain of blue-grey hills, with dark lines of hedges threading the lower slopes, and masses of rock throwing dusky shadows on the grass.

On hot summer days a sort of bluish haze hung perpetually about these hills, while the middle distance seemed to swim in a sea of floating light. All around was a singularly beautiful country. On the right the river, slow, narrow, winding, richly wooded. On the left a broad, swelling tract of pasture-land, broken by narrow green lanes and little woody hollows. The slope up to the house from the road was dotted with clumps of gorse-bushes, among which rabbits flashed their furry bodies in happy security since Alfred had grown tired of popping at them with a gun; and on this slope, in the shadow of a horse-chestnut tree, one day, in the early afternoon, Rusk and his pupil lay basking in the heat. They had just come out from lunch, and were dressed in loose flannel suits. Rusk wore a panama hat, which half hid his sunburnt face, but the boy was bare-headed. He was sitting up playing with Rex, the spaniel, while his tutor lay stretched at full length on the grass.

“What shall we do?” Denis asked for the third time, giving his companion a slight poke, as if to prevent him from going to sleep. “Shall we go out in the boat?”

Rusk gave a little groan. “My dear fellow, your capacity for moving about on days like this is simply unnatural. You might take pity on your less fortunate fellow-creatures. Why can’t we stay where we are?”

“It would be nice on the river under the trees,” Denis said, stroking the spaniel’s long, silky ears.

“Yes, but we’d have to get there first. And I have an idea there would be flies.”

“Flies!” echoed Denis disgustedly. “What matter about flies? Would you like to play croquet?”

“Certainly not.”

“Tennis?”

“This evening, perhaps. But why this sudden passion for activity?”

“Oh, well, you know, you’re lazy.”

“Very possibly. I shouldn’t mind a bathe.... By the way I saw you last night. I thought I’d better tell you.”

Denis raised his eyebrows and made a little face, but he said nothing. He clasped his lean brown hands about his knees and looked away toward the blue hills. The trees at the end of the plantation were dark and compact, though faintly veiled by a thin quivering haze that indicated the full heat of the day, while those closer at hand stood out clear and vivid, showing in relief against the remoter landscape with the freshness and brightness of a child’s transfer-picture. A few swallows were skimming over the grass in low curves of flight, and in the hedgerow at the foot of the hill the purple of a mass of wild foxgloves caught the sunlight. On the right, and higher up, one had a glimpse of a corner of the house itself--a small patch of red brick, with a wreath of smoke from one of the chimneys floating up softly into the still air. The pale stone spire of a church peeped between the trees to the left, and the distant crowing of a cock came faintly across the fields from the same direction, mingled with the low sound of summer.

“I only mention it,” Rusk went on, “because I think I also saw you the first night I came here. Is it indiscreet to ask what you were doing?”

“Supposing it is?”

“Oh, then you needn’t tell me, and no harm will be done.”

“Where did you see me?”

“I saw you going into the shrubbery. I waited for nearly an hour but you did not come back.”

The boy again sat silent. He looked at Rusk who had kept his eyes closed all the time he was speaking.

“I don’t sleep very well,” he said at length.

“Not much wonder if you wander about half the night.”

“But I don’t--really--at least, not always.”

“You don’t what?”

“I don’t sleep well. It is when the moon is full.”

Rusk partially unclosed his eyes to give his companion a glance. “What has the moon got to do with it?” he asked.

The boy shrugged his shoulders. “How do I know? I was born under it.... I am talking nonsense; don’t bother about me.”

He made a movement as if to get up, but Rusk stretched out a large detaining hand in whose grasp he was absolutely helpless. “How strong you are!” he said admiringly. “I shouldn’t mind being like that.” He surveyed his own limbs rather ruefully. “Do you think I’ll ever be any good for anything?” he asked, with a kind of half-comical seriousness.

“It depends on what you want to be good for. I don’t think you’ll ever be a champion heavy-weight, if that’s what you mean. You’ve wonderfully improved all the same, even in that direction, since I’ve known you; in the last two months, that is.”

“In the direction of champion heavy-weights?” He sighed sceptically. “I’m only seven stone something,” he added. “When I was at school I used to be ashamed to undress before the other boys because I was so thin. I am ashamed still, when there is anybody to see me--at a bathing-place, for instance. You’ve seen me and you know what I’m like. The boys at school used to call me ’Skinny.’ I hated it.” He looked at Rusk, with the half-plaintive, half-laughing expression in his eyes, which the latter had seen there more frequently than any other. Again he made an attempt to escape, but his captor still held him.

“I shall call you ’Skinny’ too, if you talk in that way.”

“I shouldn’t mind it from you, because you like me.”

Rusk began to shake him slowly, holding him by his shoulders. “How did you hit on that amazing fiction?” he asked gravely.

“It isn’t a fiction. It may be a peculiar taste on your part, but it isn’t a fiction. It’s so little of one that I don’t care whether you deny it or not.... I say, do let me go.”

“No. I want you to sit still.”

“But you won’t let me. You’re a----”

“Remember I’m your tutor.”

“I know you are.”

“It just occurred to you in time, then.”

Denis looked at him in feigned alarm. He had a trick of lifting his delicate eyebrows and wrinkling his brow which lent to his appearance a kind of quizzical, whimsical quality, a sort of inoffensive, charming mischievousness, the reflection of which came and went in his eyes, like the dancing and quivering of sunlight on broken water.

“And I forbid you to talk in a stupid way about yourself,” Rusk concluded.

“I only wish it _was_ stupid.”

“It is.”

“But why?”

“Because it isn’t true.”

“But it is true. Sure you know as well as I do that it has taken all kinds of manœuvring even to keep me alive.”

“That is a thing of the past,” said Rusk, quietly.

“It’ll have to be a thing of the future too, unless the trouble is all to be wasted.”

Rusk said nothing, but he still retained his grasp of the boy, who every now and again gave a futile wriggle toward escape.

“In any decently regulated state I should have been exposed immediately after I was born. Papa, you may have noticed, was all for exposure, but mamma wouldn’t let him.”

Rusk got on to his feet and brushed the little particles of stick and grass from his clothes. “You’re an amazing kid,” he murmured. “I don’t know what to make of you.” His eyes rested in a sort of grave, doubtful amusement on the boy, who smiled up at him gaily.

Presently Denis became thoughtful. “By the way, you didn’t say anything to anyone else about seeing me, did you?”

“I had an idea you would hardly have thought it necessary to ask that.”

Denis smiled, but he blushed too. “I’m sorry; I didn’t think.”

He took his tutor’s arm, and they sauntered over the grass slowly, the dog running on ahead, and every now and then starting off on a wild, fruitless rush when a rabbit flashed his white tail in the sun. They reached the bottom of the hill. The grass grew lush and green here, in the shadow of a hedge of twisted oak and beech and bramble. The honeysuckle was faintly fragrant, and on a half-unfolded wild rose a dragon-fly hung, gleaming in the sunshine like some highly polished jewel. The water in the ditch had dried up, but the water-grasses and wild parsley were still fresh and cool and moist. The hedge seemed full of birds flying in and out, dipping over the tops of the grasses and sorrel to catch darting flies.

Presently, through the low music of this summer world, there came the ugly noise of an approaching motor. “It is Doctor Birch,” said Denis, turning to look; and as the car came opposite them it drew up. The occupant dismounted. He was still a young man, with a keen, dear-cut face, and a premature baldness, at present concealed. He greeted the pedestrians in a smooth, tenor voice from the other side of the hedge, and Denis introduced his companion.

“I’ve been intending to call on you for ever so long,” the Doctor declared. “I was away when you first arrived, and I’ve been frightfully busy ever since I came back.... I hope this young man is behaving himself.”

“Oh, yes, fairly well.”

“As well as can be expected, I suppose.... Bring Mr. Rusk over to tea this afternoon, Denis. I shall tell my sisters you are coming.” He got into the car again.

“He’s clever,” said Denis, watching him drive off. “He was Doctor at the Asylum for a good while, but he gave it up a few months ago. I wonder if he felt he was beginning to get a bit queer himself? I’m sure it would have that effect on me.”

They walked on, keeping close to the hedge, till they reached the fringe of a little wood that lay in a triangular-shaped valley, stretching from the road up past the house and gradually widening in that direction.

“By the way, you haven’t yet answered the question I asked you under the chestnut,” Rusk observed. “Don’t you want to?”

Denis hesitated and suddenly grew serious. “It isn’t that,” he murmured. “I mean, it isn’t that I want to keep anything from you. I don’t.... Come and I’ll show you my temple,” he added. “I’ll tell you about it as we go along. I have never spoken of it to anyone else.”

Rusk laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder.

“I think you like living in a sort of cloud, and having innumerable secrets.”

“A cloud?”

“Don’t you like mystifying people?”

“No, no; it isn’t that,” said Denis eagerly. “It isn’t really. I don’t want to mystify _you_, for instance. I should like to tell you everything.... It is only that I am afraid you mightn’t understand.”

Rusk laughed. “You think I haven’t enough imagination? But even supposing I don’t understand?”

“Well, then--it would be all wrong, don’t you see? But I’m going to risk it.... It was to come here--to this place I’m taking you to now--that I went out last night and the other night you saw me.”

“You mean to come to your temple?”

Denis nodded. “You mustn’t look like that,” he went on. “I can’t tell you if you do. It is real; it is true.... It isn’t a temple,” he added, “it is only an altar. I found it by accident--or perhaps not quite by accident. It is just a big stone beside a well, but I thought it was an altar, and I know the old Druids used to look upon wells as sacred. Beside the well there is a hawthorn-tree. When I first saw it it was at dawn, and it looked pale and beautiful.”

“And do you connect it with anything--the altar, I mean? Is it dedicated to anything in particular?”

“To the moon-spirit,” Denis said.

Rusk was curious to get at his exact idea. “You mean you have a secret place where you come to worship the moon?”

Denis nodded.

“You mean it seriously?”

“Quite seriously.”

The tutor looked only half convinced. Nevertheless, there was a peculiar tone in the boy’s voice that deepened his attention, for he had never heard it there before. At that moment he happened to glance at him and it seemed to him that Denis had actually grown paler. He wondered if it were a mere effect of the light?--for they were passing under thickly-leaved boughs, which stretched almost like a green, trellised roof above them. “And for how long have you kept this up?” he asked.

“Oh, for years--ever since I can remember. Not always in this place, of course. This place I found in a dream.”

“In a dream?” Rusk thought of the crystal-gazing, and May’s comments upon it. Nevertheless, there was an unmistakable note of sincerity in Denis’s voice.

“I dreamt of it one night, and when I went there the next morning I found the stone and all, just as it had been in my dream--except that it was overgrown by creepers which I had to clear away.... What I am telling you is true,” he went on very gravely, and turning his strange, grey eyes--now a little clouded--on his companion, as if he in some way divined the instinctive incredulity Rusk had been careful not to express. “I swear that it is true, but if you still do not believe me I cannot tell you anything more.... And I know you don’t believe me,” he added in a moment. “We had better go back.”

Rusk hesitated for just a few seconds. He felt that the whole thing might become rather queer. But possibly his curiosity got the better of his common-sense, or of his conscience, for he then said, “Oh, of course I believe you: only I am a little surprised, naturally.”

Denis still appeared to waver between mistrust and a strong desire to unburden himself.

“But don’t tell me if you don’t like to,” Rusk added good-humouredly, and these words for some reason had a reassuring effect upon the boy.

He went on more confidently. “I have had this feeling all my life.... I told you that the moon affected my sleep. It affects me in other ways too. I can feel something awaken in me as it grows fuller--a kind of excitement--something moving in my blood. My mind seems to become more active--I feel freer....”

Rusk glanced at him searchingly. “I suppose you haven’t been reading anything to give you such ideas?” he questioned; but Denis shook his head. “I have always had them,” he replied. “I have read things, of course--what I could find--but it was very little. I got one or two things among Doctor Birch’s books.”

“There was the worship of Artemis among the Greeks,” said Rusk vaguely. “But I don’t know a great deal about Greek religions, and Artemis I dare say mayn’t have been very much of a moon-goddess.... There was Selene, the moon that fell in love with Endymion; and Hecate----”

“I don’t think of any particular deity,” said Denis softly. “What does it matter about names? There is something behind them all.”

“Something----” Rusk paused. The remark he had been about to make was left unspoken. “The old religions don’t interest you, then?”

“Oh yes, they do, but--oh yes, they interest me very much,” he went on with a sudden alteration of manner. It was as if he felt that he had possibly said too much and were trying now to cover it up. “It was principally by agricultural peoples like the ancient Babylonians that the moon was worshipped,” he began pedantically, like a boy reciting a lesson. “Among them the moon was a god and not a goddess. With the Persians it was one of the seven archangels....” Then his voice dropped again into its former dreamy tone: “Do you remember the verse in Job? ’If I beheld the moon walking in brightness; and my heart hath been secretly enticed or my mouth hath kissed my hand; this also were an iniquity; for I should have denied the God that is above.’”

“I’m afraid it never struck me,” Rusk confessed.

“It is an allusion to moon-worship, I suppose.”

“No doubt.... Of course, you come across references to the moon in lots of old writers.” He vainly tried to remember one or two. “They thought it had an effect on the--eh--growth of things, didn’t they? and that it sometimes caused madness--lunatics, you know?”

He was not immensely convinced by his own erudition, but it appeared to have made Denis thoughtful. “Madness?” he paused on the word, and when he went on again there was a vague disquiet in his voice. He spoke slowly and as if with a certain difficulty. Rusk regarded him, while a faint shadow of uneasiness crept for the first time across his mind.

“You begin your work when the moon is growing--and the full moon brings it to perfection.... If you fill a silver basin with water, and hold it so that the full moon is reflected in it, and if you drink the water, then some power of the moon----”

“But my dear boy, you surely don’t _believe_ all these old superstitions, do you?” Rusk interrupted, sharply.

“No; I don’t.” A troubled look came into his face. “I--I don’t know what I believe.” His voice shook, and he turned away. Rusk could see that he had suddenly become very much agitated; that he was even trembling. And this perception brought him up at once with a quick, unpleasant shock.

“Never mind, Denis,” he said gently. “We’ll talk about it another time.”

“It’s just here,” said Denis, parting the bushes with his hands. “You may as well see it now you’ve come so far.” And Rusk followed him into a kind of little glade.

The well was there, and the old hawthorn, but he did not perceive the altar till the boy removed a heap of branches which almost hid it from view. He then saw a large flat stone, oblong in shape and hollowed in the middle. It was about four feet in length and seemed to be hardly more than eighteen inches high, but it was partially buried in the ground.

Rusk examined it curiously. He was no antiquary and could make nothing of it. “How was the--the ritual conducted?” he asked reluctantly. “I suppose there was some kind of ceremony?”

“You mean in the old time?” said Denis dejectedly.

“Yes.”

“I don’t quite know. I could never find anything definite. Sometimes there was dancing. There were libations and incense and moon-shaped cakes that were covered with lights.”

All at once Rusk’s expression changed and he gave the boy a quick keen glance. He bent lower, then lower still, over the hollow stone. He seemed to have detected something. “Was there ever anything else?” he asked slowly, evenly, and without looking up; but Denis made no reply. “There seems to be a----” He paused. For a moment it appeared as if he were not going to finish his sentence. Then he brought it out in spite of himself. “Has anything been killed here?” he asked, trying to speak quite naturally. “Has there been any living sacrifice--any blood spilled?”

Denis drew back. His face was white and scared and his eyes had grown darker as with an awakened memory. “Yes,” he whispered.

There followed a silence during which Rusk was conscious of feeling rather sick. In spite of himself a sense of repulsion made him draw away from the boy beside him. “So it was that!” he said, and for all his effort he could not keep an instinctive note of aversion out of his voice.

Denis looked at him for a moment. Then he dropped on the grass and hid his face in his arms. The whole thing came so quickly, so unexpectedly, that Rusk stood there dumfoundered, not knowing what to do. The mere sight of the boy lying there had changed his momentary disgust to compassion. He felt, indeed, horribly ashamed of himself. It seemed to him that he had asked Denis to confide in him, and that he had then turned on him for having done so. He bent down over him, and called him by his name.

The boy did not stir for some minutes, and when he got up he showed Rusk a face curiously white and troubled. “I could not help it,” he said in a low voice. “I have been trying to realise it. I will never do it again. I am not cruel really. I never hurt anything before. Something made me do it; I don’t know what.... I did it twice, but the other times there was never anything living--I just brought flowers, and the things I told you of.” His words came out a little jerkily, and he did not look at Rusk while he was speaking.

“Oh, it’s all right,” said the latter, somewhat lamely. “It was only that for a moment I--didn’t understand, didn’t see.”

“I should like to explain. I--I can’t quite understand myself.... It is as if it--was something from outside. But--you know-- If it is in your mind-- It is like trying to struggle against a dream when you are dreaming.”

“But don’t bother about it,” Rusk begged. “I was stupid. I have no imagination. I can never grasp anything unless it has been drummed into me for years.”

“No, no--it was quite natural--what you felt. But----” He smiled dimly. “I didn’t think of all this when I began to tell you.”

“Ah, but you’re making too much of it,” said Rusk. “We will talk it all quietly over some other time.”

Denis shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about it; I’ve nothing more to say. You’ve seen now what I’m capable of doing.”

“I haven’t seen anything I don’t like,” said Rusk, stoutly.

“Haven’t you?”

“No.” His mouth closed tightly, and a frown passed across his face. The boy gazed disconsolately straight in front of him, while they moved along slowly, retracing their steps.

“By the way--before we leave all this,” Rusk jerked out unexpectedly, and laying his hand on Denis’s shoulder, “there is something--I mean I hope you won’t be afraid to ask me if there’s ever anything I can do for you.... You understand?... I don’t want you on account of what happened this afternoon to be frightened to tell me about things--_anything_--even supposing you think it something bad--really bad that is, absolutely wrong. I behaved like a fool to-day but I won’t be stupid again. I daresay it is rather unnecessary, my talking in this way, but still-- If you should ever feel inclined, for instance, to do something you have an idea you may be ashamed of having done afterwards--it seems a rotten sort of notion to suggest--but you know what I mean.... You will promise, won’t you?”

“Yes,” said Denis.

They had by this time issued forth again into the sunshine, and Rusk wondered what he could do to put all that had just taken place out of the boy’s mind. He felt that the sunlight was very welcome, and he breathed a sigh of relief. It was Denis himself who solved the difficulty by recollecting that he had promised to take his tutor to call on the Miss Birches, an engagement which must be kept at once if it were going to be kept at all.

“You don’t mind going, do you?” he asked Rusk.

“No; I should like to.”

They started off together, walking quickly, as if anxious to leave behind them the wood which, to Rusk, even yet, seemed to cast a kind of sinister shadow along their path--a shadow suggestive of some mysterious horror that might still be hidden there.